Bill Kristol
Appearances
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Elon Musk, that guy like who evidently is a Nazi. Like, I just refuse to believe that it was an accidental two times Sieg Heil. And he does it at a presidential inauguration. This is why I hate liberals. It's like liberals have no teeth whatsoever. They just go, oh, my God, can you believe I'm getting out of the country?
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
I'm just like, you're going to leave the country because of one guy with dyed hair plugs and a laminated face. makes a bad car and has has an obsolete uh social media platform you're gonna leave this why doesn't he leave why isn't he stopped what are we so afraid of this guy who can't fight his way out of a wet paper bag general got any anything to add to that no i i think he pretty much covers it
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Yeah, you know, I also thought, okay, it's terrible anyway, but one or two people got caught up in the dragnet. I don't know, maybe it's 10 people, maybe it's 50 people. I have no confidence that even the bulk of these people are gang members. I mean, maybe, you know, again, what does that even mean?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
There are people who hang out with people in gangs and aren't themselves criminal or criminal in a much more minor way or didn't have much choice if they're, I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Some relative is in the gang. You can't sort of turn against it. You're threatened. So anyway, I really do wonder, yeah, who these people are. Of course, God forbid they should actually put out the names of these people like a normal government would do and what evidence they have. Our friend Aaron Reikland-Melnick I saw this over the weekend.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I'm not sure if he came up with this or simply passing it on, but they gave to the ICE agents, I guess, these kind of guidelines for how they should decide who to throw onto the plane and kidnap and send them to El Salvador. Tattoos turned out to be...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
basically key to it right or i mean there are these different points it's idiotic there are these points you can give and then but i think if you have bad tattoos and what's the other thing you have to have something sort of slightly also equally insignificant those pictures of the phone or like you know where you've done things that could be gang signs or right which part of venezuela you're from yeah
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
And then, you know, you add up to eight points and there you are, you know, and these are things you look at this. It's one thing to have a list like this as a kind of guidance for who you might want to interrogate more and, you know, bring, bring to court and have an investigation about. It's another thing to put them on a plane to this penal colony in El Salvador.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
So yes, this thing, the more you look at it, the worse it smells. It's really terrible.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
No, you and I were. I mean, it's so nauseating, really, and sick. Really just sick. That's what I felt about it. And the idea that she thinks it's funny or great or tough or appropriate and that people, I guess, in MAGA world are sort of relishing this is awful.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I mean, it's one thing to send people somewhere you have to do it or make a mistake and send some other people who shouldn't be there that you don't have to do that. But that happens in life, I suppose. But to be relishing it. She goes after we know. or have very good reason to believe that some of these people shouldn't be there, right? It's not like she didn't know she was there the next day.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
She went a week after they got there, and after a lot of this reporting had begun to come out. It's really awful. I mean, I'm annoyed at Democrats, and you've talked about this. Yeah, I want to get into Democrats.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Well, because Joe Rogan is just saying what he believes, and in this case, he's being a normal human being. And Democrats cannot say a word, apparently, if you're an elected official without going through some filter of what pollsters have been telling you for the last six months. And a rather stupid filter at that of polling data. And immigration, bad. Very difficult issue. Biden border, bad.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
So gangs, bad. Tough on immigration. Good politically. Therefore, Trump sends people to El Salvador, including innocent people. and dehumanizes them, and we can't say a word about it. I mean, it's the stupidest. I mean, A, it's wrong, obviously, and totally lacking in courage. And B, it's an incredibly stupid way to think about polling and about politics. The Iraq War was popular in 2004.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
No one wanted to look like you were a fan of the people we were fighting. It's a terrorist over there and so forth. And Abu Ghraib happened, and I think this is what, summer of 2004. People were correctly repulsed, and there were huge turmoil. The Bush administration should have fired Rumsfeld then, but didn't, but did discipline the people who did this over there. They apologized.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
It shouldn't be done. We shouldn't have done this. This is the middle of a war, incidentally, which we're not in with Venezuela.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Yeah, yeah. No, this is much worse. They're just sitting in a jail here. There's no need to send them to El Salvador, you know. But anyway, and Democrats did not get hurt by, and some Republicans, John McCain and many others said this is terrible. So it's a good example, though, if they looked at the polls and didn't want to be on the wrong side of the war on terror situation.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
They wouldn't have said a word. Now, obviously, there was some of that that happened back then, incidentally. Obama, I said this to someone else the other day, Iraq war, you couldn't afford to support, to offend, to oppose that. John Kerry, you know, the one guy who did was Obama, but he was just a nobody, you know.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
You know, he was a state senator from Illinois, and he figured, I'll just say what I believe, and he ended up being president six years later. So politicians are too poll-driven generally. Democrats in particular, though, you should explain this to me. I mean, Republicans, well, I'll give you one tentative explanation. Why are Democrats so poll-driven? Driven or poll intimidated.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
And Republicans, I think a little less so. And I'm actually at this conference here with some Democrats and one guy made a very good point to me. He said, you know, the Republicans are used to having issues where they're not really on the winning side. Being pro-life has never really been the majority view in America for the 30 years that Republicans were.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Being pro-gun to the degree they are is not the majority view. People kind of like reasonable gun control. They had to defend these things. That was what their coalition wanted or they believed it. And so they found ways to kind of fight back a partial worth abortion or claim that they wanted to confiscate all your guns.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
But Republicans are the way we're used to looking at polls and figuring out, well, how do I – deal with it? How do I work around it? How do I mislead people a little bit? But whatever, instead of simply saying, oh my God, I'm on the 60-40 losing side of something, I can't say a word, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Maybe that's one reason Republicans are a little more aggressive in not simply collapsing when they see a negative poll. I don't know. What do you think? Is there something to that or?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
As a single Republican popped up to say, gee, that's not such a great idea. You know, the Constitution says otherwise, but that would be too much to ask. I don't have, I mean, I assume he won't, but I don't know. We've assumed he wouldn't do other things. He loves power. He loves being president. It does show a certain lack of confidence in his vice president, I would say.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I'm a little sensitive to these things. I've been a vice presidential chief of staff, and occasionally there was a little lack of confidence that people thought. And Vice President Quayle from top Bush people. And if I were J.D. Vance's chief of staff, I'd be like, shouldn't he be saying in answer to this that, of course not.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I mean, one thing to say is that an awful lot of damage is done just by the endless talking about it and going back and forth on it. So I talked to someone from European government last week, so in Washington, and, you know, what if he doesn't do it this time because he gets spooked or something?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
He could do it three months from now or six months from now when he needs to appeal to the base or he gets annoyed at some government doing something totally random, you know, on some other issue, right? So, I mean, I think the degree to which it disrupts the alliance, not that he cares, I guess, about that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
and disrupts the world economy, which he should care a little bit about, which is what the markets are reacting to. Even those of us who were very alarmed about Trump's second term sort of assumed that on the economy, he'd be constrained, and on tariffs, he'd be constrained, because he cares about the stock market. So I didn't think he'd be constrained on mistreating immigrants.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
He wouldn't be constrained on the rule of law. He might not be constrained on destroying NATO, but on the economy, economic stuff, somewhat constrained. But it may all have gone to his head so much It doesn't even feel constrained on this. He's talking tough now, right? We'll have to go through some tough times, but we'll come out of it afterwards.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Stronger nation maybe really has internalized the argument.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I have a great air all teed up and ready to continue to advance the Trump agenda. But somehow that answer did not come to his mind.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I was struck when I saw this European I mentioned earlier, I think, for lunch diplomat. He said they were, you know, I said what's most got you upset and rattled. Of course, that was a huge long list. And fundamentally, it's Trump's basic policies of reversing 80 years of the alliance and all this and the Hegseth and Vance speeches in Europe in early mid-February.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
But he said actually he thought for people in government, it was the transcript, the signal text transcript of Vance, the hatred of the Europeans. Yeah. And Hank Seth echoes it just to suck up, I suppose, to Vance.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Yeah. I mean, what are we even talking about here? I mean, the Europeans have done a pretty good job standing up in Ukraine. They've sent a ton of money to Ukraine. In response to us, they're now saying they'll do even more and they're going to spend a lot on defense or whatever. I mean, it's not as if the Europeans have just told us to get lost or something like that. We've told them to get lost.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
They're reacting in a pretty grown-up way. What is that all about? Why does J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth, what do they care one way or the other, honestly, about? They have a deep hatred and resentment of the Europeans. I guess it's sort of a version of owning the libs, owning the Europeans. I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
And they love bullying them, especially the little – Denmark's a very small country. They've kind of done their best to help and to be a good partner. They did send, I believe, troops to both, if I'm not mistaken, Iraq, but certainly to Afghanistan. And, you know, they've been cooperative when we wanted to actually have some troops in Greenland and stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I mean, it's not even worth getting into because it's so ludicrous, except to say that, yes, there's a deep hatred, apparently, of these European – Not just the European government, incidentally. One of the striking things about Vance's speech in Munich was he hates the European nations. It's not just this particular lefty government.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
A lot of these countries don't have particularly lefty governments right now, actually. I don't know about Denmark's.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
he's like a rabid no believe me one thing you got to say in fact i would say the moment trump won they've all gone out of their way to try to be nice they visited mar-a-lago we're upping our defense spending for nato we understand that he's got some concerns about trade we want to talk to him they've been much nicer than we have been you and i to trump and for this they've just gotten slapped around by vance and by by all of them really
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Not that he would ever try anything to stay in office after he's lost an election or when it's not his turn to be president. But I mean, yeah, no, absolutely. I want you to take it seriously in that way. Yeah, in a way, it's a harbinger not of... running for a third term, but maybe just assuming power for, you know, for life, basically, if we can put it that way.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
The other thing I would say is I think it also does soften the ground generally for the notion that the Constitution is just a bunch of advisory statements. You know, it's not actually binding on anything. So just like this isn't binding. Other parts of it aren't too binding. You know, the Fifth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the 14th Amendment, all kinds of things that they don't like very much.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
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The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Those can be kind of worked around, too.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Fine, Tim. And if we lose Tim, I'll just talk. It'll be no problem at all. It'll be one of the greatest Tim Miller podcasts, actually.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
a lack of care about following election laws wisconsin would be the nicest way that you can put it what do you make of uh of elon in wisconsin we'll talk about the the race itself yeah i mean he's not a big election law dutiful careful election law obeyer kind of guy and i guess this is part of that pattern they seem to think it's an important race both for i guess for what it will do in wisconsin as you said in terms of gerrymandering and other things
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
and also having a friendly Supreme Court in place in 2028, just to get back to our original topic. Wisconsin's a swing state, and they have in the back of their mind that, hey, that could be one where we'd want the Republican state legislature, if it's Republican, to contest the race and go to the state courts.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
Someone told me that he also went on at some length in his speech defending what he's doing on Social Security, that he's just getting rid of fraud. They're all lying about what he's doing.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
closing these offices and making it harder to get your social security which is sort of a maybe not what you want i'm talking about on the sunday night before the vote in wisconsin and secondly does show that maybe that issue is you know they feel it's hurting them some or he feels personally wounded by by it as he deserves to be incidentally
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
by doing everything so out in the open. The Trump's president has the justice department. He also, they also avoid accountability by knowing that there's a zero chance that there'll be any federal enforcement. Right. And then it goes to the state and then you get into a slight Alvin Bragg situation where why is the state enforcing a federal law? And it's awkward.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
It looks like they're just, it's just politics. If it's a democratic, you know, attorney general or something. So yeah, the impunity is pretty astonishing though and bad obviously for the country. And, And then suddenly we're two months into this administration. Is it going to stop now? I think that's something I've, I won't say I've underestimated, but I'm really struck by it.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I mean, when you have a justice department and an FBI, it's not even pretending that it will investigate any problems on your own side or bring charges, even when they're pretty obviously called for. And when it's pretty obviously excusing every single person against the legitimate charges have been brought on your own side. So I mean, it's a get out of jail card for everyone on your side. And, uh,
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
And they're also going after, obviously, people on the other side. That really, that's so corrupting. I mean, it's worse than Trump's personal corruption, I'd say, in the grift. Or even worse than his personal pardoning of people and stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
To have the entire apparatus of the federal government firing career prosecutors, as I say, taking care of your own people, going after the people you don't like out there. That is bad. That is literally what authoritarianism is. And that's what we have. I do think it's only, don't you think this Wisconsin election, I guess we'll be, so it's Tuesday, right?
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
So we'll all be, I guess I'll be writing about it Wednesday morning. You'll be talking about it Wednesday morning. Yeah. Pretty big deal in the sense that, and I'm, I mean, I think if Democrats win, people will say, well, they won the traditional election back in whatever that was, 2023.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
And, you know, probably the Democratic governor probably sort of said to reason that they would win by a few points. What if Republicans win this election? They will be a huge, freakout, wouldn't you say, on the Democratic side?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
You know, it takes a while. The locals are the last to kind of catch up to true celebrity. You know, they still think that former Mayor Landrieu is kind of a more important person than Tim Miller in New Orleans, but they'll learn soon.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
What's the Alice in Wonderland thing? I mean... Verdict first, trial afterwards or something like that. I can't remember. The Queen of Hearts, I think, says that. Yeah, I guess that's our new system. And it is the system, incidentally, on these deportations or kidnappings as well as some of the others that we're seeing at airports and stuff.
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S2 Ep1010: Bill Kristol: Stiffen Your Spines, Democrats
I mean, it's pretty horrifying, really, as you've pointed out many times. Yeah.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
It did. I was like, what are you talking about? I did not catch those. I did not catch those references personally.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
yeah i don't know i mean i agree it's it's unpredictable which of these fights just as this one was totally unpredictable and was maybe needn't have happened it wasn't like this was going to happen people eventually well yeah eventually but it could have happened six months from now they could have all been on they had demagoguery to say the least about the haitians in september and elon and vivek seemed to be perfectly comfortable with that and didn't either object to it or in vivek's case i believe joined in on it and that was from trump advanced that was not like gee wacko you know you know third tier mega people right
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
So they weren't exactly rallying to the defense of legal immigrants there, dark-skinned legal immigrants there. In a certain way, this could be put off again. They could all agree on deporting criminals, on even deporting non-criminals. They're not H-1B holders. Obviously, these are holders that are deporting.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And the money, I guess, in that original reconciliation could just be for border security and for funding all the deportation and the expenses of the administrative judges and so forth, not for deportation. It might not address the legal issue, I guess is what I'm saying. I don't know. I think generally my view now is very hard to predict.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
When you have an administration like this with so many impulsive oddballs and Trump himself at the top and so many things they want to do or say they want to do, some of them conflicting with others. Who knows what rifts open when and how and what. I think it's very important for Democrats and for the opposition to be very flexible in that respect. It's important to take advantage of these risks.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I do think that. And this is one. And if that weakens Trump a bit and knocks him a point off his approval, that's all good. That's what has to be done. I don't know if you agree with this. I was talking about this last night too. The next three months is a matter of chipping at Trump and chipping it, especially at the appointees who are weaker than Trump. Trump's their strongest person.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Vivek is weaker than Trump. Musk is weaker than Trump. Kash Patel is weaker than Trump. Pete Hanks, chipping at all these different figures, nominees, policies where there are cross-cutting cleavages, that I think is probably the opposition agenda for the next few months. At least you can't just, Trump's won the election.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
You can't stand up on January 21st and say, he's not, he shouldn't be president or I'm not normalizing his presidency. Well, that's fine. I'm not for normalizing his presidency, but I mean, he's president, he won an election. Yeah. So I think that in this respect, the willingness of them all to go fighting Trump's relative unwillingness to intervene pretty quickly to stop it.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
It does suggest there could be an awful lot of this going on, on a million issues. I mean, it could happen on Ukraine. It could happen on – well, they're obviously just on tax policy. I mean, what if Biden actually says – It's going to happen on tax policy. It sort of does get to the fact that Congress still exists.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
If they want to pass legislation, they have a narrow majority, especially in the – only a very narrow majority in the House, not that big one in the Senate. I know they're all going to capitulate to Trump mostly, but maybe not forever and not on everything. And so I kind of think the –
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
There are more vulnerabilities there than one might have thought in the aftermath of Trump's victory and Republican control of everything. And, you know, we're doomed.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And I think the notion that they could do two reconciliation bills, I think that's kind of nuts. I mean, they're going to have to jam it all into one and just exert maximum pressure to get to 218 on that one bill. The idea that they can do that twice within the year, maybe if Trump gets stronger. But it is very strange.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Six months ago, I remember saying at one of these meetings, what are we going to do if Trump wins? We gamed out some of the stuff, which was actually kind of useful. People were much too complacent, I'd say, about what could happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Yes, it was all like, and they were all like, I'm worried that the IRS could come after some of the 501c3 organizations. I think I said some version of, I don't know, why don't you think that? Why won't DOJ just launch criminal investigations of all this? Or why won't Musk fund? you know, a million civil defamation suits. Oh, no, I think the IRS, I mean, people were not alarmed enough.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Having said that, I made sort of obvious point I thought was that the transition was important. That if Trump, if he won the election with 51% of vote, let's say 50%, and enters office at 55 or 57, he's in very strong shape, an elected president who has a honeymoon. If he enters office with 45, he's in weak shape. But if he enters office with the same 50 he had
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
In the election, he doesn't have much momentum. And I think that's where we are now. I did look up just kind of his approval. There isn't that much polling, and it's a little meaningless until he's president, I suppose. But he's around where he was in the vote, actually. His approved, disapproved was like 51-49 or something like that, you know? Trump has not built momentum.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I very much agree with you. I don't know how much weaker he is, but I think somewhat weaker. Some of these cabinet picks, there's enough resistance to Kennedy and Patel and Gabbard that I don't think that's going to be a smooth show over the two or three weeks after the new Congress gets sworn in this Friday. And so I agree that he has various problems coming conceivably in these areas.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And the Congress, yeah, there still is a Senate and there still is a narrowly divided House. And they're going to want to give Trump
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
certain things to start with but it's a good question how many of those things and every defeat every every obstacle in my view though helps anything that slows the momentum the one thing i would say about vaughn and miller though is they do understand this better and it was interesting so musk intervened against the continuing resolution the cr they'd worked out trump changed the topic to the death ceiling
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
the debt limit. Remember, I don't know if that was Trump having studied deeply the debt ceiling deadlines. That was Vaught, presumably from OMB, kind of knowing this stuff and saying, Mr. President-elect, we need to, if we can push this back, that'll help us a lot. This is kind of not what we want to deal with in our first six months.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And Trump's refocused on that with a tweet that you called my attention to. I actually missed it last night.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Yeah, I think it's very interesting. I can see why Trump wants to get it out of his hair, so to speak, before he has to take office. I'm not sure he's right that it's such a huge problem for them in May or June. They'll resolve it the way they've resolved debt ceilings in the past.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But anyway, he's decided this is – someone told him, and maybe he's right, that this is the last thing he needs to be doing. with at the same time that he's dealing with all the other stuff we've been talking about. So let's do it and let's sort of semi-blame Biden. It's a piece of legislation. Biden would have to sign it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Trump wouldn't be in the embarrassing position of signing a huge expansion or, you know, or extension.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Who cares? He's the king of death. That's what I don't quite understand. But they've told him it could screw up his. I think it's the House guys.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And he would have trouble getting Democratic votes without making real concessions on the tax package or on immigration or something. So that's fair enough. And so therefore, get it done now. So I think it's not a crazy idea of Trump's because, let me just back up, I think they will bring it to the floor next week. People have sort of forgotten that Congress gets constituted
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Mike Johnson and the new majority leader, John Thune, in the Senate could do stuff in the next two weeks just because Biden's still president. Now, normally you don't when there's a change of office in the presidency, because normally you're not passing, you're passing your legislation, not the Biden administration's. And so why would you do that until your guy takes over and can sign it, right?
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
So normally the new legislation goes on January 21st, you know. But it doesn't have, of course, these legally constituted bodies, the Senate and the House. And I do think Johnson now sort of almost has to bring to the floor or try to bring to the floor a debt ceiling extension. He can't get enough Republican votes to pass it because of the chip boys of the world.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Now, maybe they think, though, this puts Democrats in a tough place and maybe they're right. I mean, do Democrats all vote against it? It is kind of I mean, they've Democrats are on record a million times saying this is stupid. We should get rid of the debt ceiling.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Yeah, and I can make a case that fighting it looks petty and actually ultimately self-defeating. They're not really going to, Democrats are not going to really destroy the U.S. economy because of some fight they're having with Trump on immigration or tax policy. So it's not a good thing for, Congress never really wins these debt ceiling fights in the end, I think.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
So maybe they should give it to Trump. Some Democrats will complain. Are you kidding me? The first thing before he's even president, we're making Biden sign a debt ceiling extension to take political pressure off of Trump. That's not what an opposition party should do. And part of me sympathizes with that, incidentally. That's the side I'm on. And people will scream about that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
On the other hand, the other option isn't so bad. And that could be like. actual legislation that's on the floor of the House on January 7th or 8th. So the next two weeks are going to be pretty wild between the nominations. And I heard from someone else this morning, who seems to know what he's talking about, I'm not sure, that there are other things they want to bring to the floor now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Some of them they'll pass, and I guess they can hold them, you know, not send them to this 20th if they, you know, they have a week or something to hold them at the desk, or it takes a week to get through both houses. But they're not going to not legislate for these two weeks. And they want some of this stuff to pass so Trump can sign it on the 21st and so forth. So
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But in this case, they weren't about to make Biden sign it. I had been very focused on the nominations, but actually there could be a lot of activity in the next two weeks. And some of it could strengthen Trump and some of it could weaken him, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
tend not to share it too, is why do it now? I mean, you can just tell Johnson, we're open to voting for this in two months when we have a normal process going and we can talk about how to package it with something. We're not going to give you this just in the first two weeks. I think that's a defensible position.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But the Roe Connors of the world are busy telling everyone that, you know, we've got to work with Trump where it's appropriate and we can't, we've got to not just be an opposition party. And if Doge has a good idea, We need to be for this good idea. And a lot of these guys, I don't know, they might be tempted to sort of let's look like we're want to cooperate with Trump at first.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
There are many cross currents in this, including within the Democratic Party, not just within the Republican Party. So, yes, I guess it'll fail. Well, I don't know. I don't know. That'd be very interesting question for actually for Hakeem Jeffries and those guys. Can they hold their members together on it?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
What are the Democrats suddenly splinter and half the stories next week are Democrats in disarray, not just Republicans, you know?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I did. You probably weren't even alive during the Jimmy Carter presidency, right? I voted for Ford against Carter. I voted for Scoop Jackson in the primary against Carter. And I voted for Reagan against Carter. So I was not a Carter supporter. I didn't hate him or anything like that. I just thought Ford would be a better president.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But what was striking about Carter was just to go through that when I was, I guess, was in college and grad school, really, in 74, 5, 6, his emergence. It was kind of crazy. One term governor of Georgia, not well known, even when he was a governor, not the most famous liberal southern governor that, you know, at the time, even kind of.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And he just campaigned and it was going to start at one percent government as good as the people. And post Watergate, it hit and there were enough still kind of Christian conservatives in the Democratic Party to give him support of the South. But he also was a good government guy, sort of, you know, northerners like northern Democrats, like southern liberal Democrats who got elected.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
if only to one term. I think it was at a one-term governorship in Georgia. He won the nomination somewhat amazingly, almost lost the election before it started 20 points behind and came within a point, you know. So I had friends who were for Carter. They thought he would save the Scoop Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, you know, Cold War wing of the Democratic Party. That did not happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I mean, historically for my generation, that was the moment that neo-conservatives moved to the Republican Party. Some of it happened in the early 70s, 1970s with Nixon, and in the 73, 4, 5.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But really, it was the failure of the Carter administration, the perceived failure, let me be fair, in both economic policy and in foreign policy that led to the sort of everyone being fine with Reagan by 1980. Whereas in 1976, even in
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
quite conservative neoconservative circles reagan was like maybe a bridge too far you know the panama canal really is at the core of our foreign policy agenda and stuff so apparently it's back trump remembers that trump remembers those days the card administration was an important moment and uh
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But more, I think, honestly, because – and the degree to which the perception, somewhat similar to the Democrats today, he was not personally that left wing. He had been the more conservative candidate, but the party just seemed to be in disarray, and the left was pulling the chains, and the teachers' unions wanted an education department, so they got that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
It was all stuff that's not really very important in the big scheme of things, probably, but it led a lot of people – Go to the Republicans and obviously the failures of both the economy and foreign policy in Iran, especially in the hostages, helped get Reagan elected. So it changed America. His presidency changed America, not in the ways he hoped, honestly, I think.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I met him a few times when he was in his post-presidency when he was Vice President Quayle's Chief of Staff. Carter was always going on these foreign trips, mostly contrary to what the Bush administration's foreign policy was. He was going to bring peace to the Koreas. He was going to go visit North Korea or some crazy thing. Well, I think he got a little involved right up to the Gulf War.
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Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
He was going to make sure that- didn't happen and talked to Saddam or to people close to Saddam, I can't remember. So of course, he would come, of course, but he would come to the White House as a former president to get briefings on this ship. And, you know, we would all, the Bush administration would try to prevent it from doing too much diplomatic damage from our point of view.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But everyone was very polite. It was a different era, George H.W. Bush. But he, of course, would see President Carter. But somehow, my main memory is, this may have just happened once or twice, I can't remember. So it was
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
since Quayle was vice president, that was a high enough level to deal with the former president, but also Quayle was vice president and Bush could happily slide after his 20 minute meeting with Carter could let Quayle and Quayle's office organize the briefings for the former president and the nice lunch at the vice president's residence with the,
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
assistant secretaries of state of whatever region, you know, Carter or some outside experts that Carter was going to and stuff. So I have this vague memory of sort of as chief of staff, like handling in some weird way, some of Jimmy Carter's visits to Washington and to the White House.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And he was always personally courteous and pleasant to me, I've got to say, but in my very brief dealings here, but that's my main memory was the sort of It was the vice president's lot to go to a lot of funerals abroad and to deal with things that the president doesn't really want to deal with.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And Jim Baker, the secretary of state, did not want to spend a lot of time discussing policies with Jimmy Carter. And Quayle was such an unusual matchup with Carter in a funny way. I think I once joked with Carter that Quayle had been elected the same year as Carter, well, they were elected in the same year in 76.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Quayle was knocked off an incumbent Democrat in Indiana in the same election in 76 that Carter won the presidency and became a member of the House at age 29, I think it was. I don't think Carter thought this was as amusing as I did, though.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Yeah, he praised Carter for the transition, but a pretty nasty, pretty tough campaign, Reagan versus Carter in 1980. And certainly the liberals thought it was the end of the world when Reagan won, even though they didn't love Carter. So that was nice of Reagan. And we'll see if Trump, I guess Trump will say some version of that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Maybe they'll write some version, a sentence like that for him to say about Biden. And I wonder, what do you think?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I mean, Trump inherits a world with many challenges and crises, leaving aside the merits of Trump's own views and appointments. And I think that's what we were talking earlier about what issues could flare up. During the campaign, it was all, well, voters don't care about foreign policy. Well, some of us would say, well, can we talk about Ukraine for a minute?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
But in the real world, as president, foreign policy does affect how presidents are thought of. Biden learned that, I think, with Afghanistan. But of course, Carter learned that with Iran. We'll find many, many instances, Bush with Iraq. And I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Some of these decisions Trump faces, even if he were running the kind of administration we would be much friendlier to, would be tough decisions and not easy ones to implement, even if he went in the right direction. But, I mean, dealing with Putin, dealing with Xi, dealing with an Iranian threat where Iran is both – this, I think, was Eric's most interesting point.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Iran is much weaker than it was a few months ago because of the damage Israel has done to Hezbollah and then the fall of Assad in Syria. But that weakness could lead them to sprint towards nuclear weapons. And there's some evidence they're doing that. And what is Trump going to do? And what is Trump going to do if Bibi comes to and says we need to attack?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I mean, I think the degree to which we could have foreign policy headlines in the first two, three months of the Trump administration – It's been a little underestimated, I think.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Totally. Yeah. Largest land war in Europe in 80 years. major changes in the Middle East, and who knows for better or worse, or both, obviously. Xi Jinping, much more aggressive, it looks like, than he was seven or eight years ago. And us having committed to be more confrontational, which was fine with me, with China, but then what does that really mean?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And then Trump flip-flopping on that with TikTok and all. Incidentally, are any of those China hawks who were all telling us how tough Trump was going to be on China? I haven't seen their apologies there. Oh,
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
No, actually, we had dinner with our daughter and her husband, Matt Continetti, and they had just seen it, actually. So I What was their review?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Okay. Maybe, maybe we'll go see it. We thought after talking to Anna, Matt, that we might go see it. I mean, Dylan was, I'm a, it's funny. Dylan was huge, obviously when I was young, but he was already in the past. Exactly. But other people were singing songs that I listened to in high school. So I would have went 68, 69, 70.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
There were many Dylan songs, but there are at that point already being sung by other people. Right. But his voice was not considered that good.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Yeah. I mean, I still think listening to Dylan singing Dylan is kind of interesting and captivating in a certain way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Who then was in the news a lot later in the week with her fight with Elon Musk. The two things that are amusing about this are you saying casually, truthfully, that you knew Matt Gaetz from the old days when he was a Jepps supporter. I mean, it just brings home so wonderfully, in a way, what it was like 10 years ago when these people were either –
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
not who they are today or they were who they were today, but it's a different circumstance. And so they manifest differently or whatever.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I mean, to understand that I've been very struck by this too, the degree to which people, One sort of knew they weren't entirely where one might want them to be as human beings, but they weren't obviously psychopaths or sociopaths or racists or anything like that, at least not obviously. They were in our circles, as it were, in different ways.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
The degree to which that happens in a society, and that 10 years later, many people have written about this, obviously, in terms of Europe in the 20s and 30s and all that. And 10 years later, they're just sailed off into a totally different place. And anyway, it is just kind of interesting. These people didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, a lot of them were, yes, in that world, that part.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I like that part. I like Laura a little more being a piecemaker.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Good to be with you, Tim, and Happy New Year a little ahead of time. Yes, well, you wrote so well about your encounter with Carrie Lake and Laura Loomer playing the peacemaker at that insane Charlie Kirk event that you seem to like going to each year. Is that some kind of character defect there? But anyway, I feel like there must be more color that you can give on that. What exactly?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I mean, I sort of assumed that the young people who've never seen another world, if you're 25, you got into this world, maybe when you were 17, you've never been in a pre-Trump Republican world, obviously, or even in a pre-Trump world, you know, politically, that you're all in, you're a true believer.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I guess I've assumed the older people, and I want to come back in particular, it's a good example of this, I think, I'll come back to him in a sec, have to have some sense of distance or irony or something. They remember a past before this. But maybe I'm wrong about that, or they don't necessarily have distance or irony, because after all, Carrie Lake, of all the people,
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
You mentioned Matt Gaetz being a Jeb supporter in 2015. If you went to Arizona to do an interview with a local anchor, the interviewer was probably Carrie Lake, and she was a totally normal, ambitious, pretty anchor person, right, on a local TV station. Yeah. So I think I'm wrong to think that only the young are fanatics.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I've always thought, I knew Banner a little bit when he came to Washington in 2013-ish and started various enterprises and told me he was going to compete with, destroy, defeat the weekly standard and all this. He always felt a little different to me. And I think he has a different attitude towards you two and towards us in a way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
I mean, more of a, I'm not sure he wants to crush us and won't blink for a minute when we're sent off to the camps. But on the other hand, I don't know. I feel like it's a little different. He has a little more sense of what he's up to and what he's doing and what we're up to and so forth. Am I wrong about that? And is that does that permeate a little bit beyond him personally, if I'm right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
You went to like a party, you know, an after party invited by whom exactly, if I could ask?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
populist agenda that i want to advance and this really does take us to the musk fight yes very much so i mean i'd say also a real i don't use this term but i mean semi-fascist agenda i mean bannon read all these wacko italian fascists 1920 that guy avola i think i first heard of him from Something Bannon wrote or said or something. So there's a kind of worldview.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
It's a very dangerous view, in my opinion. And it's deeply anti-liberal in the broad sense of liberalism. And therefore, it can lead to people being sent to camps. It's not like he's a nicer guy or has better outcomes than the more simple-minded, rabid 23-year-old megatypes. But it is somewhat different. Anyway, Bannon weighed in on it. So let's get to it. Well, I'm curious.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
So at your thing, this is pre-Elon Musk versus everyone. Yeah. pre-MAGA versus Doge, is the way I think of it, I guess. Did you even see any indications of that at your?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And what do you make of the disparities? I think on the one point, if you so pointed this out to me at a Hanukkah gathering last night, we were chatting about this. There were like a million fights within Mussolini's camp and governments from 1922.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
No, but I'm just thinking of like, you can have a pretty nasty authoritarian regime that has a lot of inconsistencies and different types and some genuine arguments about should we be, in Mussolini's case, he was anti-clerical, that he's pro-Lenin, the church, he's, you know, got the church on board and stuff that annoyed some of his early supporters. They held power nonetheless.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
And I guess, do you think it's a serious, you know, thing that they're going to have to resolve? Can they just live with the tension between... I guess one way to call it is MAGA versus Doge. I don't think that's a bad way of putting it, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Exploit the Rifts
That's the term they've kind of adopted for themselves. I mean, I feel like obviously there are more humans in the MAGA camp, I think, who voted for Trump than in Doge camp. But there's more money in Doge world and that matters to Trump, too. I don't know. What do you think of it?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
But anyway, and yeah, instead he focuses on what is at the heart of their appeal, one of their major appeals, which is a kind of we've got to get beyond a successive cult of guilt. Musk actually used that phrase, I believe, and that's a phrase they use over there. About, you know, remembering the Holocaust, basically. And so I quote in the morning shots this tweet stream I came across.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Someone told people like Susan Collins years ago that, you know, the way you can persuade Trump is by making it seem that Trump cares about these things that you care about. And then you ascribe to him those views. And then he kind of realizes, yes, kind of in his interest to pretend to care about these things. He's ignored all this for years. He's done fine ignoring Susan Collins.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And of course, the idea that Trump really doesn't want abuse in any of these departments. He wants people there who are going to blow the whistle on contracts going to his buddies and political appointees, manhandling career civil servants in ways that are not legal and so forth. I mean, it's, of course, beyond farcical. This is a sidebar, but I think it's related in a way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
What's interesting also is Trump's doing all these things. They're being – done by nominal acting appointees. There's always an acting secretary in every department. There's always a chain of command. But there are people who are not even close to the top level. They've been put in temporarily. And of course, almost all the nominees haven't been confirmed.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, in a normal world, you would at least let the pretend to have, we're going to ask the cabinet secretary to review the performance of these IGs, Let the Pambandis and whoever at all these different departments, Doug Burgum and all these guys, quote, review. Fine. They'll, of course, end up firing them according to the White House's wishes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
But at least there's a certain patina of respectability, orderliness here. So they had their list. They were going to go after all. They didn't even have a list in this case. They just basically literally went after all of them. And if people should understand, I mean, I was in a department and dealt with the inspector general quite a lot when I was chief of staff at the education department.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, not quite, not too much. Thank God we didn't do many things wrong, but they had issues and would come up and we'd talk about, you know, we'd try to resolve them in an appropriate way. They are the watchdogs. Some are more effective than others. I'm sure they can't watchdog everything, but they are a check. They are a check, as Susan Collins said. on fraud and abuse.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And again, there wasn't even a pretense that, well, this guy here in the Interior Department, I think it's time for a change there. Doug Burgum recommended that to me that we're going to do that. Not even a pretense. It's just, they're all gone.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Next, you're going to tell me that Trump University, those degrees weren't important and weren't worth the thousands of dollars Trump milked out of people for those, tens of thousands of dollars for those.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I don't know the man at all. Professor Martin Sauerbrei, based on Google. He seems to be a 45-year-old or so German historian.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, is Trump going to even put in nominal inspectors general? I don't know. I mean, the inspector general, if I'm not mistaken, the intelligence community was the person to whom people went in the summer of 2019 to report on the Ukraine incident. And what Trump was trying to do in withholding funds for Ukraine and sort of pressuring them to do a fake report on Biden, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
So they were actually – and it worked. I mean, and certainly the inspector general have a relationship with Congress. So if they don't get satisfaction within the executive branch, this is the kind of threat that they'll go to the Congressional Oversight Committee. So this is also Congress's – we'll see if Congress responds at all, but –
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Congress is, I don't, I'm not holding my breath for the Republican senators. So there they are running the Congress. They have inspectors general in these ranches to help them as Susan Collins might know to root out fraud and abuse. And are they going to do anything serious about what Trump has done? I do find that hard to imagine.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
He makes some obvious points. I mean, for one point, Musk wants to say, you know, Germany's been crippled by this guilt. You know, Germany's had a pretty good run since 1945. West Germany first, and then all of Germany. We've helped them. They're a good part of the West. I mean, really? Have they been crippled?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
How gullible are they? How much are they pretending to be gullible because the alternative is more dishonorable that they knew it was all a lie and they just went along because they were scared to take on Trump? I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Is that a country that hasn't done better than we might have expected over the last 70 years? Because they did come to grips with the Holocaust more than others, more than Austria. In any case, Sauerbein makes this point, and then makes a personal point about his own,
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Yeah, terrible. And it's not even an issue of, I don't know, should the government pay for certain treatments and procedures people want going forward? I think it's kind of hard to distinguish. But maybe people could make some kind of colorable, plausible argument on that. These are just people. I mean, they're just people who we don't know. Some of them have transitioned jobs.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
10 years ago, some two years ago, some are in the midst of it conceivably. But anyway, you're just kicking out people for who they are, right? You're not like denying. It's a little more plausibly legitimate, though not really, to deny a service, as it were, a special service, right, to someone. I mean, this is just discrimination flat out, you know? Flat out discrimination. Well, I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
What about the Defense Department? Are they going to go out to the civilians there, too, if any of them are transgender people? I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
He is not crippled by a cult of guilt, but he also thinks that not to be serious about one's nation's past and to take that seriously is denial. It is avoidance of moral responsibility and avoidance of political responsibility in terms of how to prevent this from happening.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Again, I didn't draw this, make this point in one of the shots, but you read it and you think a little bit about our own issues with slavery and with, you know, our past and coming to grips with it over the last decade. 60, 70 years, but the last 10, 20, too, as well. And I think how healthy that has been. Can it go a little too far? Sure.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Well, on the economic end, the one thing he does seem to want to do is put tariffs on everyone. That one, which the Wall Street Journal was, you know, desperately hoping wasn't serious. He'll be talked out of that by his serious advisors. So there's a dispute with Columbia about whether they'll take people being repatriated if they're treated in some ways or flown on a military plane.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
That's just Trump showing off when the military is involved. Biden, I believe, every two or three days in the Biden administration, a plane full of people being repatriated went to Colombia. The Biden administration deported a lot of people who were there who were criminals and who had been apprehended. And there was no issue with Colombia. I think it was the same president then.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
How you doing, Bill? It does feel longer than a week. It does. I don't know if it feels like... A month, six months, or a year, but we're not even talking like a little longer than a week, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Now this guy, the president, maybe caused more of a ruckus than he should have because Trump chose to use military planes. Does it really matter? I don't know. Maybe she's just take them in. And I guess they now worked out something. But Trump's first response was tariffs, right? I mean, it's the one thing he believes in, in economics, actually.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And I do think there's an article, I think yesterday, that February 1st, people are now increasingly thinking he is going to slap just across the board, 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico, kind of incentive to get them, I don't know, actually, but you know, is Canada being very mean to us? I don't know, you know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
But anyway, the idea that Musk calls in on Saturday to encourage them to basically minimize the Holocaust two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, pretty appalling. And then this morning, they're having these moving ceremonies at Auschwitz. Poland, and as the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, by Soviet troops coming from the East.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Yes, but some of these things won't work out quite as nicely as bullying Colombia a little bit. And their president may have worked out. We don't know yet, obviously, quite. So, you know, I think he could get us into trade wars and genuine price hikes because of tariffs. The propaganda side of it is underrated. I myself, I feel like I've underrated that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I just, you don't want to believe that it works. And so you sort of discount it. But you think Dr. Phil has been embedded with ICE or the Border Patrol or, you know, in Chicago for these raids. It's so... like, ludicrous and jaw-dropping and inappropriate. I mean, these are very serious things, Tim. You know, we have undocumented immigrants who are criminals. It's very sensitive.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
We are having precise raids to go snatch them. And it's the professionalism of ICE and the Border Patrol. And how dare these cities try not to cooperate and stand in the way? And incidentally, we have Dr. Phil in there, you know, as part of the show. I mean, how can you take seriously? Biden did deport plenty of people. There are people who should be deported. How do you take it seriously, though?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
No, I think that's an interesting point. I mean, I myself couldn't take the Greenland thing seriously, and it came up in the first term, but the degree to which he's been prosecuting it, so to speak, this first 10 days of his week of his administration, as opposed to 2019, where it kind of came up and then it disappeared.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
You know, it was people like Pompeo and mothers just put it on a back burner. I mean, that's where you have Pete Hanks. I mean, he's thrilled, right? I mean, since his idea of being sec-deaf is... you know, writing something and DOD does not equal DEI. And that's his first act, really.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
He becomes Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, in charge of a million and a half people in the military, a lot of civilians, a DOD, huge responsibilities around the world. And his act is this performative childishness. And that's how he thinks of his job. I mean, the propaganda stuff's infuriating or annoying, but this is serious. This is bad. This is really bad.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Interestingly, they stopped inviting Putin to these, or any Russian government representative, to these celebrations after the invasion of Ukraine because they correctly understood this is what Putin is doing. It does not entitle him to be on the side of the liberationists, you know? So they have a kind of sense of the current relevance of what they are commemorating. King Charles is there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And it also misunderstands that China and others can step in. And I guess China already has said that about Colombia. Now we're much closer. And so we, China can't quite do what we might do in terms of trade with Colombia, but they can do some things to help out if we're, you know, raising tariffs and stuff and stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And so again, it's, if you care about fighting China, the balance of power with China, other adversaries, this is crazy, right? I mean, there are times when you have to get a tough situation, be, a little rude to allies, perhaps, if they're not being, you know, this happened in the Cold War a lot, and we paid some price domestically in some of these other countries.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
This is totally and utterly gratuitous. This is entirely for Trump's vanity. I mean, really. And as you say, propaganda, and especially if you beat up a country like Colombia, which has, you know, a fair number of undocumented people here, and it's a country that's had troubles in the past. It seems to have done pretty well the last 15, 20 years with our help, incidentally, a bipartisan basis.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Bush and Obama signed a free trade agreement with Colombia, which has helped the economy there a lot. Nonetheless, if, you know, for Trump's base, it's good to be fighting with those people down there in Central Latin America, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Yeah, and I totally know, I've tried to make this point a couple of times, JV, I'll make this point too, that, I mean, especially on the international side, I mean, can we just, you know, can people take a minute and think about the first half of the 20th century and then the 75 years, three quarters of a century since the first half of the 20th century? I mean, this is a pretty simple test case.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
It's not too complicated. It divides up kind of neatly. And I think the arguments are pretty strongly – and I made this point about Germany. I mean, the principle of the AFD in Germany is that Germany is a nightmare and it's been a disaster to have gone – basically to have come to grips with their past and then –
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
by coming to grips with it, move beyond it, and to be proud to be a liberal democratic state, proud to be part of the EU and of human rights treaties and so forth. That's the AFD's claim, its agenda. And we have Elon Musk, very close confidant to the President of the United States, just endorsing it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I can't quite get used to saying King Charles, but King Charles III of Great Britain is there, and Macron from France, and Trudeau from Canada. We have a, if I could say honestly, a slightly second-tier delegation of some cabinet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, the Trump people seem to believe they can get at least a face-saving deal for them so that, you know, there's not an immediate disaster. Putin, I'm not sure that Putin wants to give him a face-saving deal. Putin might benefit more around the world by just humiliating the U.S., and Trump is the president of the U.S., so he's happy enough to humiliate Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
For all of Trump's affinity for Putin, Putin is never quite reciprocated, right? He treats Trump with a certain amount of contempt, you know, like in Helsinki in 2018 and stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And then some of my friends who are, you know, adjacent to Trump world think, well, we could, Trump, if he sees that this really a disaster politically. He doesn't care about anyone dying or hundreds of thousands of people, you know, millions of refugees or a nation being crushed. But if he sees it could be a political problem for him, maybe he'll do something.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
So they're busy writing articles, which I don't criticize them for because it's the right thing to do, I think, in this case, to try to appeal to him somehow. It'd be politically bad for you, you know, if Ukraine is crushed and is it just nightmarish situation and, you know, millions of refugees and everything. deaths, et cetera. I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Charles Kushner is going to be our ambassador to France, someone who's going to be our commerce secretary, and... And a representative for the Middle East, all Jews, which I guess is, which actually isn't appropriate. I'm Jewish. Jews have a special connection to all this. No question. Though it was not only Jews who were killed in Auschwitz, obviously, but predominantly.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, maybe that could make Trump get a little tougher. There's just no evidence, though. I mean, maybe he will. I hope he will for the sake of the Ukraine and of the world. But is there any area where the range of possibilities was Trump will do the extreme things he said he's going to do, or he's going to be more cautious and moderate, really?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I'd say the bulk of areas he's going in, it's only a week, in the extreme and radical direction, wouldn't you say? I mean...
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And in the case of the immigration executive orders and the NIH funding stops, I mean, there was a way to do it that would have been tough and we wouldn't have liked it, I don't think, where he would have said, I okay, you have 90 days to justify every single one of these study groups in NIH and review processes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Obviously, they're going to go on for now because people are in the middle, literally, of doing these studies and reviewing proposals. But the secretary of HHS in 90 days is going to tell me which ones we should cancel, how we should change things. That would be pretty tough, actually, but That would be a sort of more reasonable way to do it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
The willingness to just cut the stuff off, to take a little bit of a PR hit, presumably, when the implications of stopping everything at NIH hit through. When you see the executive orders in immigration, I would say very much in this direction, that they're on the radical side of what... he could have done that still would have been very tough, you know, and still pretty negative.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
So now the hope is, well, the executive orders and the rhetoric and the pauses and those are on the radical side, but maybe 60 or 90 days from now, he walks back from that a little. And I hope he does for the sake of the country in some ways, and maybe he will in some of these cases if there's enough political pressure, but it's not heartening.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
But, you know, Macron came. He's not Jewish. King Charles came. He's not Jewish. The German chancellor, president, and the chancellor who's outgoing and the likely, his likely replacement all came. Germany has a special standing. Trudeau is not Jewish. It's something that should be of concern to everyone.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Sadly, I mean, I think, so I've been told you for this, that, you know, the two questions that are asked to almost of all the political appointees, whatever, you know, certainly in the foreign policy, national security areas, but maybe beyond that, They have to be okay on January 6th. They have to be okay on Ukraine, which means willing to sell out, eager sometimes to sell Ukraine.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
So it's not as if he's going to be getting that much pushback from the second and third ranks of his own administration, at least from the political appointees, and they're weakening the career civil service. So in the first term, there was a lot of pushback. We know that from the 2019 impeachment. There was Fiona Hill. There was Alexander Vindman. There were people in there who were saying, ugh.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And so that did have an effect, ultimately, stopped some of the worst things from happening. There's not going to be that. So as you say, MAGA on the outside is fervently for the betrayal of Ukraine, as they were for the pardon of all the rioters. I come back to the pardon where we began. I think I fear that that was indicative, right? That was a place where he had a clear choice.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And you could argue, even if he thought of it in his own words, self-interest, the better choice was the J.D. Vance way, much easier to defend. Instead, he went all the way, so to speak, went all in. You'd have to explain why he's not going to do that in some of these other areas, I'm afraid.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Why are people so excited? I haven't followed it that closely, but why are people anti-Kansas City? He's a great coach.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Trump sends kind of three semi-high ranking Jews from his administration who have been nominated to be in his administration. And meanwhile, Musk, who's much more powerful than any of those three, is busy giving speeches to the alternative for Germany, the kind of success, the anti-anti-Nazi party, at the very least. So it got me a little bit upset.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
He's a great coach, and Mahomes is a great quarterback. So what's not to like? I hated Kansas City growing up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
The military was segregated at that time, which again, I don't think that takes away from what the U.S. did in World War II and certainly not what the black members of the military in segregated units did. But yes, that's why they don't like it. It's a reminder that they don't want to yearn for the 40s, but all was not well in the U.S. in the 40s and 50s.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Hexeth this morning, I just saw this before coming on with you. referred in passing, I guess it was in passing, I don't know how much, how intentional it was, to Fort Bragg, which was renamed Fort Liberty, I think, two, three, four years ago. Bragg was a particularly noxious Confederate general. So that's part of Hegseth's kind of, you know, What?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
That is, I mean, you know, it's one thing if you didn't think about it in 1990, you talk about Fort Bragg. We all did that, obviously. But it became an issue. The military recommended changes. The Biden administration put them in place.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
That really is like going out of your way to praise some quasi, in the German context, some, not Hitler, obviously, but some quasi-fascist figure from the 20s or something, right? I mean, it's deeply creepy. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
We have a good ecumenical division of labor on this. We've got a joke coming here. We've got a rabbi and a priest. Well, we need Sarah to come on and take care of the Protestants, I suppose. But no, I just would make one other point that struck me from the outside, so to speak. Yes, you say he made his point. He can defend the detentions and the raids and all that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
He could have even said a normal, if I might say, vice president in this circumstance might have said, you know, I respect the Catholics. They spend a lot of money on they do try hard to help immigrants. I think some of these policies, though, could be misguided because they could be an inducement for them to come in. I mean, whatever you want to say. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, you can have a sort of, you know, a critique of their understanding of public policy. He doesn't do that. He says they're in it for the money. I mean, sadly, that is actual bigotry. I mean, unless he has evidence that a lot of people are getting very rich over there at the, you know, working in Catholic relief missions and food shelters and so forth, helping immigrants.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
Well, Musk, of course, had done the salute, which wasn't really, of course, a fascist or Nazi salute. On Monday, he joked about it during the week. I actually wrote about that in Friday's Morning Shots. Then Saturday, he decided to video into an AFD rally in Germany. Okay, he's endorsed them. He likes them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, it's really disgusting. You were too nice to him.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
I mean, I assume one hopes and I believe it's the case. And I think, as you say, we would know the names of those who had gotten off or the people who hadn't been the murders for which there were prosecutions. They were prosecuted, obviously, in the states in which these crimes happened, as most murder cases are or assault cases. And this was a unique situation because it was in D.C.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
It's indefensible in any case, but I suppose if you wanted to defend him, you could say he likes them for other reasons. They don't like the EU bureaucracy, tax cuts, Gorsuch, whatever they're for, judicial appointments. Instead, he actually focused on- Yeah, I know. I don't know. I feel bad for Gorsuch. That wasn't quite fair.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
So and it was an attack on the U.S. capitals. And so it made sense for the Department of Justice to take the lead. And it did. But again, they were convicted by juries. I mean, the degree of dishonesty advances.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
The FBI, which, you know, kind of an important agency in this respect. Kash Patel, or nominated to be head of the FBI, Kash Patel, who was a total defender of the most violent criminals from January 6th, never accepted the distinction that Tillis wants to make between the kind of innocent ones, the harmless ones, and the violent ones. Was proud of his association with various violent criminals.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
And was having a hearing, I believe Thursday, before that same committee meeting. So let's see if Senator Tillis says, you know, Pam Bondi, she wasn't answering hypotheticals. I was wrong, Senator Tillis, about what President Trump would do. But to be fair, Pam Bondi wasn't presumably clued in either way, so she should still be attorney general.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
But you, Mr. Patel, have been an explicit associate with, promoter of, and defender of these violent January 6th criminals. So I can't vote for you. Will Tillis say that?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
I mean, it's terrible. We're negotiating against Ukraine and mostly on Putin's behalf with an occasional fake request of Putin, which he scornfully denies. And then Trump says, okay, I guess that I'm going to go back to beating up Ukraine. I mean, it's shameful to abandon, obviously to abandon Ukraine, I believe, to Putin and the overall reversal of US foreign policy and undermining 80 years of
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
von einer Außenpolitik, die die Dinge viel besser gehalten hat, als sie vorher waren und viel besser ist, als sie werden, nachdem wir diese liberale internationale Ordnung verlassen haben. Unsere Rolle im Zusammenhang damit ist einfach schrecklich. Es ist eine politische Sache, aber es ist eine besonders schreckliche Sache. Er war so wütend mit Zelenskyy im Oval Office. J.D.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Vance und Trump, er war so wütend. Putin geht dann aus seinem Weg, um Trump für eine Stunde auf dem Telefon zu warten. Er spricht in einer Konferenz. einer Fake-Business-Leader-Konferenz und seine oligarchischen Freunde und Dependents in Moskau. Sein Peskov, dieser Pressevorredner, kommt auf und sagt öffentlich, Herr Präsident, Sie sind jetzt für den Telefonanruf mit Trump aufgerufen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und er sagt, er kann warten. Und er geht dann für etwa 50 Minuten, einfach aus seinem Weg, um Trump zu ermutigen. Trump ist nicht überrascht von dieser Ruhigkeit. Was Putin tut, ist in Ordnung.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Yeah, he'll do a good job negotiating, really. Tough guy, tough-minded negotiator. Mona Charon, who's coming up after us, wrote a book 20 years ago, 25 years ago, called Useful Idiots. This was when Mona and I were conservatives. And this was an attack on... A justified attack though on people who were credulous about the Soviet Union.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Way back from the 30s and 40s who pretended the purges weren't happening and the famine and Stalin's horrible totalitarianism and the phrase useful idiocy was coined. Mona could explain, I think it was coined a while ago and Mona used it for the title of her book. But I mean, this is such a level of useful idiocy. This is a more idiotic form of useful idiocy. But unfortunately useful, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
I mean, he'll go, quote, negotiate. And it's like the media, has that Witkoff interview with Tucker gotten much attention? I don't think so, right? A little, but like... Shouldn't that be kind of an unbelievable outrage? He's bringing home a painting, a painting of Trump that Putin has given him, and it's a deeply moving moment. I mean, what...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Ich bin jüdisch und Tim ist nicht. Das ist, was sie bezeichnen. Ich bin nicht für den Kopf. Es ist schmerzhaft, es ist schmerzhaft. Können Sie sich vorstellen, wenn einer unserer Allies plötzlich auf das schaut? Was sind sie? Ich meine, ehrlich gesagt, es ist ein Bild. Die Europäer haben es ziemlich gut gemacht, ich würde sagen, weil Trump so schrecklich ist.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Sie sehen, dass sie wollen, dass sie aufstehen. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob sie das können, weil sie nicht haben, dass sie das können.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
resources we do to help ukraine and to resist russia but they know that yeah they know the truth about putin invading ukraine it is i've never i was a reaganite i had a certain amount of disdain for the europeans they were kind of they didn't chip in as much as they should have on defense they didn't want they didn't understand they were quite they were cynical sort of real politik they didn't want to defend democracy i've got to say i find myself rooting for the europeans all the time in the last two months
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und ich würde nicht sagen, dass wir gegen unser Land kämpfen würden, ich glaube nicht daran, aber ich meine, dass wir mit all diesen europäischen Führern verabschieden und nicht mit Herrn Witkoff verabschieden. Wir sind die Franzosen in dieser Situation. Wir sind die Franzosen geworden. Ja, und schlimmer gesagt, wir sind die Vichy-Franzosen. Ja, genau.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Das war exzellent, was Tim gemacht hat. Ich wusste nicht, dass er so etwas imitiert hat. Danke. Tucker Carlson, ich bin überrascht. Usually when we've done a couple of these panels and Tucker comes up, Tim then reminds people that I gave Tucker his first job in Washington, that he worked for the Weekly Standard. Boo!
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
This is why I'm just doing this here, because Tim was probably saving that for the end to make sure that I went off to a chorus of boos, you know.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
I have one minute on that. I mean, so Covington & Burling, the Washington, D.C. firm, that was the first one Trump targeted, because one of their partners was offering pro bono defense work to Jack Smith, who did his job as a Justice Department employee. He's a career employee. He doesn't have a huge amount of Money that I know of.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
And so they offered to defend him pro bono if the government came after him, which surely it is. And so Trump went after Covington, stripped security clearances, tried to really ruin their business. You can't enter, you can't, federal government isn't going to work with you, deal with you, obviously.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Wenn man ein Geschäft hat und eine Gerichtsfirma hat, kann man ein Geschäft mit der federalen Regierung haben. Ein Routinen-Business, kein Trump-Business. Und man muss mit verschiedenen Organisationen umgehen. Mit jemandem aus der EPA, wenn es um die Umwelt geht, mit jemandem aus der Kommerz. In einer überragenden Art und Weise. Ich meine, nur mit legaler Repräsentation.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und das kann wirklich ein Geschäft der Gerichtsfirma beschleunigen, was Trump tut. Und auch wenn sie nicht rechtlich das, was er sagt, tun können, die Vorstellung, dass die Unternehmen sagen, dass diese Firma von Trump geblasen wird,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und mit Bondi und allen anderen, die im Kabinett sind, die Sekretärin so unruhig ist, wüsste man, dass man sich auch um Covington kümmert, auch wenn man legal mit Leuten treffen kann, weil es ein riesiges Zeichen von Cane auf dem Kopf ist, wenn man Covington kümmert. Covington kann das resistieren. Es gibt eine zweite Firma, Perkins Coie, die Trump nachgeholt hat.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und so haben sie die Repräsentation, um zurückzukriegen. Sie haben einen temporären Verstärkungsantrag bekommen, um Trump nicht mehr zu tun, weil es wahrscheinlich unconstitutionell ist, was er versucht, zu tun, um Menschen von gesichertem Sprache zu verurteilen. Und dann hat Perkins Woods eine relativ kleine Firma, eine große Menge gouvernementliches Arbeit.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Sie werden aus dem Geschäft gebracht, wenn sie nicht... Dann Paul Weiss, massive New York firm, wildly successful, well established, long tradition of pro bono work, they boast about it on their website actually, civil rights work, some really admirable stuff back in the 40s, 50s, 60s actually. und auch später wahrscheinlich. Sie sind diejenigen, die nicht, sie könnten kämpfen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Sie könnten helfen, und sie könnten helfen, andere Leute zusammenzustehen. Für Perkins, Cooey, und für nicht, dass er Gerätefirmen targetiert. Und wiederum, wenn es Gerätefirmen sind, warum wird es nicht auch viele andere Entitäten sein, richtig? Und anstattdessen kapitulieren sie.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Ich denke, dass die Art und Weise, mit der das signalisiert hat, alle zu kapitulieren... Ein letzter Punkt an diesem Thema. Ich war auf der Textschale mit einem Hörer und sie waren enttäuscht und furchtbar. Aber sie werden einen großen Preis bezahlen. Ich meine, die Leute werden weggehen. Die Parteien werden sich nicht damit befassen. Die Klienten werden sagen, was sie tun.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und ich bin so in Ihrer Partei, weil ich seit neun Jahren mit dem Republikanischen Partei bin, aber auch in den letzten zwei Monaten gesehen habe, habe ich gesagt, ich wette, dass niemand weggeht. Ich wette, dass wir keine hochprofilen Resignationen sehen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Paul Weiss hat Jay Johnson, den ehemaligen Kabinettsvorsitzenden von Obama, Loretta Lynch, den ehemaligen Verteidigungsvorsitzenden von Obama, als Seniorpartner dort. Ich habe keine Worte von ihnen gehört. Ich habe keine Worte von jemandem in den meisten der großen Firmen gehört. Und in der Tat, die Letter, die vorgeschlagen wurde,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
um Leute auf den Amicus Brief anzunehmen, auf Behalt von Perkins Coie. Sie können keine Signaturen bekommen. Ein sehr respektvoller Brief, der von dem ehemaligen Vorsitzenden-General gedraftet wurde. Und die Firmen sagen, wir wollen nicht, dass du ein Seniorpartner bist. Mach es, wenn du weißt, es ist ein freies Land, du kannst es signen, aber es könnte unser Geschäft schaden.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Die anderen Partner sind beschäftigt. Ich wette, es ist das schreckliche Ding, dass sie keinen Preis zahlen werden. Sie werden nächstes Jahr mehr Geld verdienen, weil ihre Klienten denken, dass sie mit den Trump-Mitgliedern umgehen können. Und ich werde eine Firma verlassen, die einige Menschen, die Pro Bono-Immigranten und so weiter, repräsentiert.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und der Degreis, zu dem der Autoritärenismus hinausgeht, Ich hoffe, es ist nur so viel. von der Trump-Administration, aber der echte Zufall und der Versuch, wirklich Autorität zu stellen, nicht nur in der Regierung, sondern in der Gesellschaft, das wird ein großer Moment sein.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
I mean, the judges have been pretty good so far, and some of the pro bono, some of the public interest law firms, the ACLU, again, 20 years ago, an organization I would have been arguing with all the time, fantastic representation in the El Salvador case. And Judge Bostad has really been courageous and hardworking and impressive.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Aber es wäre schön, wenn mehr Leute ihn ausgesprochen und erfreut hätten, richtig? Ich meine, ich sehe nicht so viele, ja, ehemalige Juden, ehemalige römische Staatsanwälte, ehemalige, ich meine, Michael... Und Roberts hat es auch gemacht. Roberts hat es auch gemacht.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Nein, ich meine, es zeigt, wie weit Trump weg ist, dass Roberts glaubte, er hätte das Statement ausgeben müssen, und er hat es gemacht. Aber anyway. Ja, ähm, okay, hier geht's.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung. BR 2018 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Vielen Dank. Vielen Dank.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Wolltest du zuerst Bantern machen, oder sollen wir einfach direkt in die Scheiße gehen? Ich habe nur eine Frage. Ich bin in Arizona sehr oft, meine Freundin aus der Schule lebt hier in der Nähe von Scottsdale. Wenn du aus der Phoenix-Area bist, wirst du gegen oder für die University of Arizona? Vier! Vier! Gegen!
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Well, good luck tomorrow against Oregon. And then our oldest daughter and her husband, our son-in-law, went to Duke, so I won't be with you guys next weekend.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
You know, I did, and we've both been angry and indignant about the deportation of the Venezuelans to El Salvador without any due process, without any proof that they're particular gang members, without anything, at the say-so of the President, I suppose, and his team of Eager Deportations Fanatics. But even, I don't know, did we expect it to be this bad? I mean, we were alarmed and indignant.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
And also indignant that not enough other people were indignant.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
No, I'm totally with Tim. Just two things, just one footnote. You realize these people were in detention.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
This is not a case where sometimes you arrest someone, it's a ticking time bomb, something horrible is about to happen, you can't follow every nicety of due process perhaps, you get them off the streets first and then you worry a little a day or two later, maybe a week or two later even about exactly, but these people were in detention, that's how they could put them on the plane, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
They were not a threat to anyone. Die meisten von ihnen sind wahrscheinlich Gang-Mitglieder. Sie wurden in den Vereinigten Staaten verhaftet. Wir haben gute Gefängnisse, sie werden nicht weggehen. Was war der Wunsch?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Der Wunsch war, den Gerichtsschutz zu vermeiden, die Verwaltung der Gerichtsverwaltung zu vermeiden, die Probleme des Durchführungsverfahrens zu vermeiden und die Prädikate zu erstellen, dass sie es tun können. Und ich denke, das ist so wichtig, weil es mit ihnen anfängt, aber jetzt wissen wir, dass 500.000 plus Menschen ihren temporären Schutzstatus verlieren werden.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und sie werden undokumentiert. Und, du weißt, ein paar von ihnen werden einen Kriminalrat haben, glaube ich. Oder vielleicht haben sie alle den gleichen Namen als jemand anderes, der einen Kriminalrat hat. Also denke ich, wir sind auf einem schrecklichen Abstand. Und ich stimme total mit Tim. I'm just infuriated.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
I had a conversation with actually a Democratic member of Congress, a good guy, a good member actually, someone I agree with on almost everything. It's like, Bill, this is the hill we should die on. If I hear that phrase again, I'm really going to lose it, first of all.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
You know, someone else said at a recent conference I was at, well, you're playing into Trump's hands when you make a big issue of these immigrants. It's like, if I hear that, Trump's president of the United States. What does playing into his hands mean? He'll get 0.2% increase in popularity for two weeks. 18 Monate nach der Wahl. Es ist so verrückt.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Ich bin sehr überrascht, dass alle die Reaktion überdenken und nicht eine echte menschliche Reaktion haben, zu einem wirklich atrociousem Verhalten von der Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Es ist unsere Regierung, die Menschen schickt, die keinen jüdischen Prozess hatten, in einer sehr überschrittenen Art und Weise, mit Namen, die sich verwirren, und so weiter, und ein paar ungewöhnliche Menschen. Und manche der so genannten schuldigen Menschen sind nicht verurteilt von einem Verbrechen. Sie sind vielleicht nicht die schönsten Charaktere der Welt, aber in Amerika meistens.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Und vielleicht sollten sie verurteilt werden, wenn sie hier ohne Dokumentation sind. Aber das ist sehr anders, als sie aufzulocken und sie in dieses Hellhole in El Salvador für ein Jahr zu senden. Ich meine, für wie lange? Ja.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
And Trump said, remember a week ago he had this goofy tweet, you know, the Tesla vandals, that's domestic terrorism. And everyone dismissed that as that's Trump being Trump and he's using the phrase, he doesn't really understand what he's doing. And then it turns out, guess what?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Pam Bondi is thinking about charging them, trying to increase their vandalism crime or whatever, you know, and destruction of property crime to a case of domestic terrorism. So all these things that are dismissed as Trump being Trump and don't make a mountain out of a molehill and you're playing it to his hands when you
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
Wenn man sich über etwas verärgert, sagt er, es sei denn, im zweiten Termin, das war nicht so im ersten Termin, da gab es genügend Schutzrahmen innerhalb der Regierung und auch außerhalb, auch die Republikaner im Kongress, jetzt gibt es keine Schutzrahmen. Und so muss man das, was er ernsthaft sagt, nehmen, weil So far the evidence is, everything he says, they do a week later.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1006: Live from Phoenix
And things are proceeding much more quickly through the stages of authoritarian takeover than even we expected.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
No, it's fantastic. And I wish more of our Democrats, you know, who are in politics would be as clear spoken and plain spoken and speak the truth as much as Fanon did. I was listening to that. So I was up on the next panel. Then you were up after us. I was waiting kind of to go on. It was running a little late.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And I was there with Gary Kasparov and Tom Nichols, which was our panel, which was kind of foreign policy. And I was struck when Fanon said it. We've said versions of that, but he said it so with such authority. And he has the kind of authority to say it, obviously. Sure. And then when I guess when I was on when Gary and Tom and I were on stage is when Tarrio showed up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Yeah, it's wonderful. I hadn't heard that clip. That's pretty amazing, actually. Yeah, I mean, checks and balances, all that stuff, law, rule of law. So yesterday, really, you know, for Dan.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And I think it was sort of an accident that the Capitol Police guys were at that point were kind of leaving. So they had gone up to the lobby and these guys came in and they had their little showdown, which did not get to violence, thankfully, but yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Yeah, the degree to which, I mean, it's going to become normal, don't you think, that proud boys, or just let's just say pro-Trump vigilante types, hopefully not indulging in violence, but a certain amount of intimidation and threatening and making life unpleasant, it's going to start showing up at every... anti-Trump gathering, but not just anti-Trump, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
At the ACLU and the pro-immigrants organizations and abortion rights. I mean, why not, right? And they've sort of got a yellow light. Again, I was struck that it seemed like Tarrio was pretty careful not to break the law. He didn't hit anyone.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
So they can do an awful lot of making life unpleasant for people and deterring people, therefore, from exercising their rights of free speech and assembly and so forth by just showing up with that kind of implicit Trump has your back behind them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
I mean, I say in the morning, he's clownish, not much about him, but I will defend myself in a sense by saying that I also mentioned that Charlie Sykes used to love to say that, still says, that clowns with flamethrowers can do a lot of damage. And that's the situation we're in, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
No, that's a good point. Yeah, people just assume they're not going to say anything.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
A lot better. No, I mean, they went to the bad news is that it's the most votes they've gotten. It's like maybe they've gotten 13 percent or something before the high world mark and they're getting 20, 21 almost. So that's not great. On the other hand, they've been polling at around 20 for the entire election campaign, which there I think is about like two months.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Some of them are more purposeful, some of them are more just loudmouths and clownish, and they're all committed to doing a huge amount of damage to our institutions and to our system. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
So they didn't go up, even though there were terrorist attacks, really, and some very bad crimes in Germany the last two, three weeks that got a ton of attention, understandably. And even though Musk and Vance waited for them. And so it turned out that
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Actually, the German voters, to their credit, were not particularly moved by Musk, you know, doing videos into the AFD conferences or Vance speaking in Munich and, in effect, endorsing the AFD.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And so that's a good sign that there'll be a coalition government of the center, like the current coalition government of the center, except with the Christian Democrats on top and the Social Democrats second, as opposed to the way it is now. A little bit glass half full and all that, but I think, yes, the center held. Actually, in Europe, this is the great irony, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
We're supposed to be the strong country, the bastion of the West, the Southern Europeans. God knows, when I was a kid, the communist parties were getting 30% of the vote there, and then they were all wusses, and they didn't want to fight enough, and they don't spend money on defense, and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know what? Basically, in Britain, France, Germany...
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Italy, a little complicated, but not as pro-Putin. Central and Eastern Europe, certainly the Scandinavian countries and the Baltic countries, the center is holding. I wish it were holding here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Yeah, the way maybe I put it, if you include the U.S. in this, is there's clearly a backlash against Trump-Musk fence and what they're doing and how they're doing it. It's not going that well for them. And as the results come in, I think the backlash could get stronger. So that's the good news. And it's a healthy backlash. It's not kind of idiotic or anything. radical left-wing backlash.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
It's just like, we just have functioning government institutions and a decent liberal democracy here and support our friends and be hostile to people like Putin. So the good news is there is that movement, I think, here at home and maybe around the world, actually. The bad news is how much damage can they do before that movement, you know, has political effect, both internationally and at home.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
It's sort of a race between the increasing revulsion, really, against Musk and Trump and the willingness to begin to abandon them, maybe, by some of their voters and some, even conceivably, some Republican elected officials. But the damage is being done in real time, obviously, both internationally and at home. And that's the situation we face. And I do think
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
I try to make this point in Morning Shots. Larry Diamond, the Stanford political scientist, makes this point. It's kind of important. move earlier rather than later. The autocracy just becomes embedded too much at some point. And people say, oh, 26 elections are going to be good.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Well, I don't know, after 18 months of Musk, of Patel running the FBI and Bondi running the Justice Department and Kristi Noem running DHS and all kinds of information operations and other use of law enforcement to tilt the playing field, maybe calling in the military on some fake, you know, domestic necessity and so forth. I don't know. I think you can't just count on
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Don't worry, public opinion is going to ultimately move in the right direction and public opinion will be reflected, you know, 100%. That's not the institutionalization of the autocracy. This is a point Bob Kagan made, is a real danger.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
It could be. I fight these two different interpretations in my own mind. One, there's such clowns, it's all going to blow up and they'll do some damage. But its institutions are somewhat deep. They may not have enough time to do huge amounts of damage in a way that Trump will suffer when they all make obvious mistakes and do things that even...
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
the republicans so desperately want to get along with trump can't quite defend you know that's part of me thinks that part of me thinks what are you kidding yourself bill i mean they're just gonna everything republicans will stick with the whole of them they confirmed patel i haven't heard you've been following this more closely this morning than i have i haven't heard a whole lot of complaints about dan bongino being the deputy director of the fbi from a party that once claimed to care about law enforcement and so forth and again having people who are unqualified inexperienced don't know what what they're doing
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
We got one clap here, one clapper, me and Jared are the only ones left.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
is in a way a feature, not a bug, right? If you're an autocrat, you want people who are totally dependent on you, who have no independent standing, who have no stature, because if they have standing and stature, they might resist a couple of things, and they might get some of their colleagues to resist.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
I'm fine, Tim. Yeah, I don't really follow Dan Bongino that much. I said in Morning Shots that I thought he was one of the more clownish of the Trumpists. Was that unfair?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And if General Milley, I remember this from 2020, when he threatened to resist Trump, basically all the other chiefs said, well, we're quitting if he quits. Because you know what? They knew General, they'd known Milley for 20 years, right? He was a four-star, they were four-stars. Similarly with sort of the senior law enforcement types and senior people in every area, obviously.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And that's why they want people like Patel and Hegseth and Bongino.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
active agent as his deputy that competent active agent probably was not pro january 6th insurrection and probably not pro would not defend the truth of the big lie about the 2020 election and therefore trump and some of his people there insist on those two things i think for any senior post so trump's the trump's so to speak everything else i guess
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
No, I talked to a couple of defense types when it happened. It happened around 7 p.m. Friday night. I was actually at the principal's first reception and chatting, as it happened, with a military officer who was there in his personal capacity in civilian clothes. But he introduced himself, and he was chatting, and he was being pretty discreet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And I remember as I left them, you know, we talked for five minutes and I said, well, it's about 7 p.m. Friday. Don't you think this is probably when they fire, you know, Brown and everyone else, right? I mean, this is like, aren't they big on Friday night firings? And he laughed sort of nervously and we agreed, well, yeah, I guess nothing had happened at this moment as we were talking.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
We didn't think. And I actually ended up leaving the reception about 20 minutes later and looked at my phone and there it was. As Bob Kagan said when I talked to him yesterday on the Sunday World War podcast, it's about the firings, not about the hirings. You know, I don't know much about General Kane. Maybe he'll be fine, maybe not. There are a couple of questionable things.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
The main thing is he has no independent standing. He was in the Guard after he'd been in the Air Force. He went back into active duty. He worked in the Biden administration kind of amazingly as the main military contact to the CIA. But he's not a four-star. He's not someone who's had a combatant command or been chief of staff of one of the services.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Those are the two things that the legislation says the chairman should have been one or the other. Now, the second provision of the legislation is the president can waive this when it's in the national interest. But Why was there no one who had been a combatant commander or a chief of one of the services who could have replaced General Brown? Why are we replacing General Brown anyway?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Trump said nice things about him in his statement. So it's all inexplicable unless you assume that they want someone who is much more beholden to them. than any of the actual generals who'd been around for a while, who'd served under administrations of both parties, who had a, as you say, kind of independent standing would be.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And then, of course, they fired the Jags, which I think people who followed this stuff more closely than I do thought was maybe even more striking and startling. Never happened. Never is how you just wipe out the Jags for each service.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
So you then are going to be interviewing and appointing Jags, whose guidance is going to be, presumably, but I think I can say this with some confidence, whatever Trump orders is lawful. So none of that kind of complicated, gee, I have a question about this. You got to be a little careful the way you formulate this here at the White House.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
I think we need to go back, Mr. Secretary of the White House, and say this isn't an appropriate way to formulate an order to the military. None of that. None of that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
You know, this is one of the hidden costs, in a way, second-order costs, I don't know what the right way to say it is, consequences of Trump and Trumpism here, is that the kind of people who are going to be staying in the government, some will stay as patriots, I think, and try their best to mitigate the damage. Others will stay just because they'll stay. But people who can leave may well leave.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
I've heard personally about two people youngish mid-career officers, they don't want to serve. I mean, they may stay because they're patriots and they've risen pretty far in their respective services, but they don't want to be in some chain of command.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
They're not high up enough to be directly dealing with Hegseth, but with Pete Hegseth and with the kinds of quality of officers and civilian types who are coming in to the Pentagon. The military is going to be a little harder to simply reduce to loyalists than the civilian types, but they're going to work pretty hard at it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
And it's not going to happen overnight, but two, three years from now, the people who will have been promoted, the people who will have acted in such a way so they can get promoted. I mean, I think it's very damaging. This is true not just in the military, obviously. I think the brain drain from the government, but also the character drain. I don't know if that's not a word, I guess, but a term.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
But if you know what I mean by that, the quality of people leaving or not coming in. is really going to affect just the quality of our governing institutions and the personnel in them for quite a while, I'm afraid.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
Yeah, just what you say that, I mean, we all want to believe it can't happen here. We want to say, oh, gee, it's worse than I expected, but there's still these guardrails ahead and there are, and we shouldn't, you know, exaggerate it, I guess. But boy, I mean, if you had said five weeks ago, was it five weeks now? I can't even keep track. Less than five weeks, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
that all the guardrails that have been trampled would have been trampled, and the Republicans in the Senate would have gone along with these nominees, and the kinds of things that these nominees have said didn't come back to bite them, and the lying, as was the case, I think, with Patel, but everything, just everything, and everything Trump is doing, and then, of course, the betrayal of Ukraine.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
If you had said all of this within five weeks... I mean, maybe that's it. Maybe everything else now sort of stabilizes at this level, but why not? Isn't the safer assumption to assume that the pattern continues and goes ahead? And that's Bob's main point. If you think three, six, nine, 12 months out, unless we can really stop this and then reverse it, we are looking at a very bad situation.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
He just was struck, and I say this in the Morning Shots this morning, that, I mean, on the one hand, they're very strong. Trump and Musk causing wrecking havoc. He did win the election, not by a few miles, but they've got control of Congress. Nothing can be done. On the other hand, they have control of Congress by four votes in the Senate and two at the current moment, I think, in the House.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
I think it's going to be three when they have a special election. Is it that impossible for four Republican senators to step up and stop autocracy in the United States? Is it impossible for three House members, some of whom care a lot about just take Ukraine as one issue, to say, I'm sorry, I'm not voting for an appropriations bill that doesn't fund Ukraine. That's it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
You know, I'm Mr. Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania. I'm Mike Turner from Ohio. I'm someone serious who cares a lot about Ukraine. I think sincerely it is really invested in it in terms of learning about it and so forth. I don't know. Is it that much for them to do? So in a way, part of me thinks, I don't know. It's a big steamroller, but it's a fragile.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
This isn't a good metaphor, but you know what I mean. It's a fragile steamroller somehow.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
No, that's a good point. I mean, the chaos is better than submission. Sure. But there's a limit to what it can do and what it can accomplish. And what it can accomplish more of is in some of the programs that can keep, you know, current budget levels, presumably, or prevent Trump from institutionalizing some of the changes he wants to make. But I agree in the power ministries.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol and Jared Polis: Send In the Clown
He has so much more power because, you know, in foreign policy and defense, he has an awful lot of ability to make stuff happen. And in immigration and law enforcement to a slightly lesser degree. Ultimately, we can't depend on simple chaos and pebbles in the road and molehills ahead of them. There needs to be an actual willingness to stand up to Trump at some point and sooner rather than later.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Yeah, and just to add a more less elevated point, I totally agree with what you're saying, is also it's hard to predict. I mean, you never know, I find. It's very hard to know what issues backfire, where they overreach, what voters... click into and what they know to how the world plays out, of course, right? I mean, Bush had a big problem with the Iraq war when he was inaugurated in January 2005.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
It didn't go well for 2005 and 2006. But the things that really clobbered the Bush administration in its second term in the first year were where they decided to have a big priority of radically reforming Social Security, which no one was aware that that's what they were running on in 2004. And secondly, Hurricane Katrina. So things happen, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And you don't know kind of where the weaknesses will emerge. And obviously, we don't want people to suffer like a Hurricane Katrina type situation. But massive war in Europe with Ukraine, possible confrontations or lack thereof or capitulations to China, cross-pressuring of Trump's base. I think there's a lot that could be done there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I mean, I noticed that even Tom Cotton, who's been an awfully loyal supporter of Trump, couldn't abide the TikTok flack, and at least on Twitter was criticizing it. Will he do something in Congress? I don't know. But I think... You got to test a lot of different issues, partly because you just got to do the right thing and say the truth for the for later.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Maybe someone will pick it up a year later when the polls change. But also because, you know, practically speaking, I think people don't have a good I don't have a good track record, I should say, of knowing kind of which issues, you know, we're going to get a hit and which are. And final point.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I tried to cheer myself up this morning by writing a little morning shots about how we shouldn't be intimidated by all this bluster and executive orders and the entire media deciding that Trump has conquered it all and all these people accommodating and capitulating. So I'm trying to cheer myself up. But I wanted to begin by congratulating you on Jaden Daniels' performance Saturday night.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
For all the talk about how powerful he is, and I myself have said that he's triumphant and dominant and so forth, and he is. There's no point. I can't wish that away exactly right now. His actual approval, favorable, unfavorable rating, if we can just be back to politics for a minute, is slightly underwater. CNN had it minus two, and I noticed 538 average was minus one.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
He's gone up from about 43, 44 percent to 47, 48 percent since the election. I don't think that's a huge rise, given that he had a pretty good honeymoon. No one was attacking him much. People were capitulating right and left and excusing him right and left. And, you know, I actually was surprised he can't get above 50, which he is not above.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
So it's not as if we're looking at, you know, King Kong here in terms of American politics, FDR in 36 or something. How can one even think of opposing him? And incidentally, just to take FDR, as it occurs to me as I say FDR, so he was really powerful, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
He wins the biggest re-election victory maybe in American history in 36, Democrats control, I don't even know what, three quarters of Congress or something like that. He's getting America out of the Depression and so forth. And he stopped on his big court stop packing scheme, what, a year or two later. I mean, things do move fast in politics.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
So people should be less, yeah, less deterministic and less defeatist than they are.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
It's cute. I think it's nice. I'll turn off the recording. It's just a plea for sympathy. No, they are there. We're at our son and daughter-in-law's house. And they're the two-year-old, three-year-old, almost three-year-old, just five-year-old are very much enjoying the snow. They're supposed to be outside enjoying the snow. They seem to be inside enjoying having been in the snow.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Yeah, I'm skeptical, at least, of it and more or less opposed. I mean, if individuals were contacted and said, yes, I would like one, I don't begrudge Anthony Fauci, who's 81 years old, who's going to be unjustly gone after, certainly by the Republicans. call before hearings in the House and so forth or in the Senate. But I don't begrudge that pardon. I guess he accepted it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
for the commanders so you've been promoting him for what at least three years two years at lsu but you're a huge lsu booster and i was kind of discounting that you know that just him being excessively loyal to lsu then he came to washington and i've learned over the years to discount washington redskins now commanders fans in a big way because they get excited when they win you know two games and then they end up you know having a miserable season and i haven't seen many games this year almost any so i was totally unprepared for jayden daniel's performance saturday night which was really fantastic i gotta say
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
But they did it in a pretty haphazard way. It's the members of the January 6th Committee and staff. I happen to know some of the staff. I know some of the members, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger. I have the impression they didn't want the pardons. I don't know that it was explained to them exactly what they're supposed to do now if they don't want them. Do you not accept them?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Can you not accept a pardon? I think it's legally murky, actually. Maybe you can, but no one... Again, my impression, I know this for a fact. I won't say this is an impression. Many people who may be on the list didn't know if they were on the list and don't know now as we speak at 9.30 in the morning. I mean, it's been a bit of a chaotic thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And so Mark Milley, I mean, I respect Mark Milley, but you know what? Mark Milley, there would have been totally free legal work volunteered for him to defend himself against baseless charges. And I almost think, wouldn't he...
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
welcome standing up to these bullies and making a point about proper behavior as a senior military officer so i'm disappointed in the pardons i guess is the way to put it and uh i don't think it helps it gets back to the point we discussed a little bit earlier i think it it's unfair it's not like pardoning god knows a bunch of january 6th rioters but will it be used that way by all trump defenders absolutely biden did his pardons trump as it did his pardons what's the issue right
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
It's a tradition, I guess. I seem to remember it from when we were leaving the White House on January 20th, 1993, at the end of the Bush-Quayle administration. Not that I was there, but the Bushes did it for the Clintons. Vice President Quayle, I don't remember if he had to do it for incoming Vice President Gore, and I'm sure if they were supposed to, they did it in a nice way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
But yeah, it's a little bit much. I mean, it gets to the broader point. You can be a traditionalist or an institutionalist, as people say a lot these days. But at some point, simply being a traditionalist or institutionalist in the kind of sense of, I'm just following this because this is what was done before,
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
It undercuts actual institutionalism or healthy traditionalism where you're upholding standards. And I don't think it would be amiss. President Biden shouldn't gratuitously necessarily attack Trump or anything like that, but it wouldn't be amiss to simply pass on this to Trump, as you say, and meet him at the Capitol at noon, right? Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And I guess having moved the inauguration indoors, there's not space for all the buddies and donors and others, prospective donors who are going to pay quite a lot in effect to be there. So they're being shuttled over to the Capital One Arena, which is where the Capitals and the Wizards play, 20,000 seats.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I'm sure, I don't know, maybe they get the nice boxes there at the top so they don't have to sit just in the upper deck. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Do you think someone's made this point to me yesterday when I was giving up on my attempt to stay away from Trump stuff this weekend that the grift could really get to people? No. I mean, the grift in the plutocracy side of it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I mean, it's so evident and it's so grotesque and it's not available. I mean, I guess individuals can buy these bitcoins or whatever, but it's not the grift is available.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Right, the people who, yes, and you read these articles, the banking CEOs, of course, the financial guys, but a million others, too, just kind of glorying in their access and in their ability to get things done. And, well, of course, we see this all with Bezos and Zuckerberg and so forth. I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Oh, I guess I forgot that. That's right. Well, he'll get you tickets, right? I mean, you're at the very top. After whatever family will come, Tim Miller is at the top of the list, no question.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
People might look at that and think this is – I mean, there's always been an element of this, God knows, two cheers for capitalism, not three, and always an element of robber barons and all that. I was thinking about that. I've got to go back and reread about the robber barons. What –
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Robert Branch is obviously a pejorative name for these business sites, but my impression of them is I'm sure they were not beyond a little bit of, you know, jimmying the system and paying off state legislatures and, you know, whatever to maybe government agencies to get the right railroad route or the right oil drilling permit or something. But they did produce oil.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I mean, they did like actually, you know, there are actual railroads that were built by these guys, right? Yeah. And then they gave some money to philanthropy, and we have Carnegie Libraries, and we have the University of Chicago from the Rockefellers and so forth, and Duke University from Mr. Duke. And I don't know. I mean, does that make up for whatever misdeeds they did? I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I'll let other people judge that. But there's not even a pretense of any of that now. I mean, it's all just, don't you think? I mean, it's just grift, 100%, all grift all the time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Shouldn't you have him on, incidentally? I mean, I'm happy to be a guest, don't get me wrong, but if you got Jaden Daniels, I would step aside one Monday.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
didn't treat workers well all the time and there are many uh that's why we have labor unions and so forth but the degree of contempt these people have and this you see this in the rhetoric around doge in particular for actual civil servants uh look i call them bureaucrats not civil servants if you don't want to be so nice to them visit the education department for three years i've worked with and that the white house saw them a little less directly but uh you know some of them that can be changes and reforms and they maybe they have too hard to move them around or to fire them and so forth
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
The idea that these people, though, deserve no respect at all, who are working for middle class, sometimes if they make it up near to the top, upper middle class salaries, working quite hard, trying to do the right thing, mostly, and doing jobs that are kind of important that they be done.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And it's one thing to treat them with a certain kind of politeness, but deep down think, okay, we can really improve the system here. It's too bureaucratic, etc., etc. They're not treated with any courtesy or politeness. And I find it kind of disgusting, honestly. And I suppose this is just me, you know, Washington, D.C., deep state person who knows a lot of people who work in government talking.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
But it's really terrible, I would say. And it just shows what they made a lot of money. Fine. No one's actually proposing to take away. Joe Biden was president for four years with the Democratic Congress for two years. They didn't take away a lot of those people's money. Quite the contrary. They're richer than ever at the end of the Biden administration.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Now they're presumably going to be even richer than
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
drifting, if nothing else, but they can't just sort of politely enjoy being billionaires and respect other people who haven't succeeded that way and haven't, you know, whatever, for whatever reason they didn't choose to, or they didn't, they weren't able to work the system quite that way, or they didn't have Elon Musk's promotional, self-promotional abilities, or to be fair, they didn't have some actual abilities because even when some of these people have, I don't have them either, but those abilities, but the notion that you should basically respect your fellow citizens.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And you should respect people who are making $50,000 a year working as nurses and people who are making $140,000 a year working as the higher ranks of government. And you should respect people who are making, you know, working for you. And that's all out the window. And I got to think that's a it's very corrosive and be that it does fit into the kind of nihilism that is a sustainable devote.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Is that what? People don't want that, I should think. That's why I wonder how much the plutocracy side of it, the grotesqueness of the grifting side of it could end up hurting the Trump administration politically.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Yeah, no, we'll have so much time to talk about it. I guess the one thing that strikes me is He's doing it all with such shock and awe. We had a great piece by retired General Mark Hertling about shock and awe. That doesn't always work out so well. He first heard the phrase as a junior officer, I guess. It's like, I don't know, is that really going to work on the battlefield?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
It works for like a day or two and then... And if you're not ready to dig in and do the hard work for the counterinsurgency and so forth, that didn't work out so well in Iraq. And he sort of makes the point that maybe that'll be the case here or implies that'll be the case. That could be the case. I sort of feel that way. I think on immigration in particular, I put it this way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
That was my fate too. I wrote this Friday. I said, I'm going to spend the weekend watching football, catching up on some Brit box crime, British crime shows, maybe reading a book. I'm supposed to be reading a novel, Trollope. And of course I lasted, I made it to a football game or two, but I mean, I couldn't get distracted.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
The impression he's giving is that he can do everything and that the executive orders are going to solve all these problems.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
and i'm in the economy i suppose that there's been pretty good actually energy production under biden maybe he'll go up some more maybe in some other areas he can do some things he can make some people's lives unjustly unpleasant in the transgender realm and other such things immigration strikes me he's claiming he's going to solve this problem and i wonder and i'm basing this probably on the conversation i had with aaron reichlin milnick and other stuff that people have written recently it's not an
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
A, it's not clear how much it's a problem as opposed to a good thing for the country to have these immigrants working here and how much damage he's going to do if people get deported or self-deport because they're so fearful. And again, leaving aside almost the human damage in a way to these unjust, the injustice of what's going to happen. He's taking a lot of responsibility on.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And I just wonder what that looks like six or 12 or 18 months from now. You know, there's a reason presidents don't mind sometimes saying, I'd like to do this. But, you know, Congress has to act and Congress is being recalcitrant here. And what could I have done? You know, I think Trump's not giving himself much of an excuse in that way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I remember this number. I'm sure I've got it wrong, but like maybe $80 billion in tariff revenues right now. That would be a pretty big increase. in tariffs, which will have unanticipated or anticipated maybe economic consequences, which will not all be good. That's what I mean.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I mean, in a way, I was thinking as you were talking about a month or two, I guess Roosevelt introduced maybe the concept of the first hundred days in 1933, they had to really get going fast. And a hundred days was considered lightning speed. And that's kind of lasted, hasn't it, even into modern times. I think Gingrich talked about the first hundred days in 1995 with a contract for America and
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
My inbox was full of all the announcements of, you know, the Trump executive orders are coming. And then people texting me, emailing me articles about the horrible plutocrats and the horrible authoritarians. And I couldn't make myself stay away for even the whole weekend, honestly. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
That gives you at least a little running room. You also get Congress on board. So it's sort of like a lot of people. He's doing this all himself. It's on him. It's on Steve Miller. It's on Ross Fodd. It's on J.D. Vance. And I do... I'm not so sure all these guys are that popular and all their ideas are that popular.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And all these cabinet secretaries are going to be like, oh, yeah, they're the guys we want enforcing this. Because, you know, Pam Bondi, she's really thought through the legal complexities of how to do all these things and how to deprive people, some people of some civil rights they thought they had without actually harming other civil rights or harming people in ways that are totally
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
of these other policy areas. We really trust Pete Hexeth. He understands the military well enough. He has enough experience managing huge institutions to really get rid of the DEI stuff without actually doing huge damage. I mean, maybe this will all work out a little. Maybe they'll have a good run for a week or two or three. I suppose they probably will. But
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I kind of feel like two months from now, this could feel pretty different than it does in the first blush of shock at all.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I can't. I'm at a loss for words. You know, it's usually often in these inaugural speeches, we go back and skim through them. They begin the president's incoming presidents begin with a little riff on the Bible that they've, you know, this is the Bible, George Washington news, or this is something that my family, you know, and it kind of is a nice way of getting into politics.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
the solemnity of the moment, but also its greatness, the peaceful transfer of power that Washington began. And now 200 years later, I think this was a big, I think George H.W. Bush did this in 1989, if I recall. And of course, well, Trump can't very well do a peaceful transfer of power rhapsody, can he? That's not kind of his thing, you know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
One thing Trump said, final point, over the weekend that I didn't get any attention, I was, where was this? I think it was in his speech yesterday. I saw a clip of it. They stole the election from us in 2020. We're not going to let that happen again. And it struck me as ambiguous. I mean, maybe saying there wouldn't be fraud again and they'll have changed the rule.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I don't know what they'll do in the federal government, but they'll change the rules so those votes can't be stolen allegedly in Georgia and Arizona and Pennsylvania. It had a slightly more ominous sound to it, too, as if like, you know what, we may not be.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
allowing an election that removes us or our party or himself if he wants a third term or jd vance or whatever from power in 2028 there'll be an election don't get me wrong just the way there is in hungary and russia for that matter but the playing field will be pretty tilted by that and i don't know you know i've been one who's not gone down that path and we'll never have another election again or whatever but you look at tiktok and you look at x and you look at
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
What they're doing with the federal government and the amount of money they'll be doling out to friends and allies and making clear that if you aren't on board to reelect, the next reelect or the election advance or whatever, that money goes away. I don't mean to end on a down note, though.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Yeah, Warren Harding was sort of disgraced in history over the Teapot Dome scandal, which I don't believe. I think it was about oil rights, but I don't believe it was at this level of the Trump scandal. Scam and the associated grifting. I don't understand any of it. I mean, Susan was asking me earlier, can you explain that?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
crypto and how is it related to what are the coins called bitcoin and then there's blockchain blockchain is an important part of the whole thing it's like i have no idea so i'm not the best person i'm not the best person to explain this or discuss this but the degree of grift the billions apparently that he stands to make the degree to which people could just buy favor by letting them know they're investing in something that basically flows right to his bottom to his pockets to his bottom line
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
It is beyond imagining. It's not like selling the incredibly chintzy thing of selling your Bibles or selling your sneakers. I mean, there at least is a I mean, it's incredible scam and and and, you know, vulgar and terrible and all this and taking advantage of people. But you are buying something. You're just paying 10 times more than you should. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I mean, that's a little different from this, which is is a level of grift and possible corruption that, as you say, I think we've never seen here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
No, I think that's unfortunately, sadly, right. I mean, certainly if you're, what, 25 and under, but maybe even 30 and under, this is the world you've lived in. I mean, it's not as if we can think back, maybe it's just nostalgia or whatever, but to other politicians we've known and to a political era that seemed a little more
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
It was to hang on to standards and to punish people, perhaps even if they violated them. I don't know. Didn't Mark Sanford have to – it just comes to mind for some reason – have to resign as governor of – where is he? Governor of South Carolina because of his little vacation there in Argentina or something. I mean – You know, that's so pathetically nothing today, right? I mean, less than nothing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
So no, I'm with you. And I do think that it's bad for the country, obviously, and the culture. And incidentally, this is not fair. I mean, Biden is not like Trump and the Biden administration's misdeeds are not like Trump's. I don't, nothing comparable. Having said that, I do think Biden's
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
pardon of Hunter, the kind of ramshackle way the pardons were done this morning without any really explaining them or the confusion of it all, that weird, you know, the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment is part of the Constitution. I've just decided it is as president. I mean, really?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
He's deciding it is, you understand, based on a ratification by an alleged, you know, alleged ratification by a 38th state in 2020. So he could have decided this on the basis of Justice Department guidance in 2021 or 2022. No, he's decided to get five days before he leaves the presidency. I mean, I don't think Biden's helping, honestly. And so here we are.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I agree that nihilism is a good, unfortunately, a good word for it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I'll make the sort of negative case, which is Trump wants you to believe that none of it matters. And I do think Havel and others, Vaclav Havel and others who've studied and lived under forms of authoritarianism always said this. The authoritarians want to make everyone a nihilist. Because then it's all up for grabs and they're crooked, but the opposition is probably crooked too.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And so, you know, why not let them be crooked and get along and not cause trouble and so forth. And I do think that's, I mean, the TikTok thing is unbelievable. It's not just what you said, that what you said is absolutely correct. But Trump himself was, of course, initiated the TikTok, proposed the
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
when when he was president and praised it as late as 2023 if i'm not mistaken right he was still on board that then it turns out one of his biggest donors is a huge big investor in tiktok and then it turns out he has god knows what else is happening beneath the scenes and now he's reversing it sort of without any legal basis i don't think delaying it and he's going to work something out maybe the u.s government he said under his control control half of tiktok i'm great the government controls half of one of the major you know a major media platform is that kind of the way things are supposed to work in the u.s i don't
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Good point. I mean, my main argument against would be Trump wants us to become nihilists, so we should resist becoming nihilists, and we should look to the future and – find a leader like Jaden Daniels to lead us out of the wilderness.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Yeah, I think it has to be recreated, and that can't be done simply by wishing that it was still strong. And it does require more, I think, bolder thinking to You need to build anew, so to speak, not simply prop it up with patching in a part of the column that's falling down. That patching is not bad, incidentally. It's a temporary expedient.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
That's why I do mention – I'm joking about Jaden Daniels aside. I mean, I think we do need new thinking and really new leadership. And that's easier said than done. And I myself get annoyed when I read all these articles saying, you know, people shouldn't just fight Trump. They need to think in a fresh way. Well, I write that myself sometimes, but what does that mean?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
Well, I don't write the first part. Can I just, since we're into our feelings, what are my feelings over the weekend when I gave up on my resolution not to think about Trump and about all this? The number of people writing pieces about how we can't just do what we did in the first term, just oppose Trump. I mean, that was really and that didn't work. We need to do something else.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I mean, whether something else is and get along with him more, dealing case by case kind of look. Some Democratic senators said, Tina Smith of Minnesota, I don't know why I'm disguising her name, that, you know, she's not going to oppose everything or chase everything's foolish. Trump does. She's going to watch out for the voters of Minnesota.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
I guess that's reasonable if you're elected representative. But, I don't know. I don't think opposing Trump the first term was so bad. And so it worked kind of, didn't it? He got stopped from doing a lot of bad things he could have done. A lot of people, you know, managed to stay here as immigrants. And he didn't succeed in kicking them out or making their lives, in most cases, too miserable.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
He didn't succeed in a million other things. He didn't destroy NATO. He didn't whatever. And people resisted him internally and externally. And they lost Congress in the House in 2018. And he lost the presidency in 2020. So there's so much. Do you find this? I was reading so many people sort of being disparaging the efforts that people have made.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
And I don't think that's quite maybe we have a bit of a self-interest in this, but I don't think that's that's fair. And I don't think it's healthy going forward. I mean, you don't know what's going to work in terms of fighting. I'm not for fighting every single thing. Obviously, it has to be sensible. and figuring out where to pick your battles and so forth.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Resist the Nihilism
But there's too much advanced defeatism here, I think.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And I think one point Aaron makes very well is Trump wants to convey the impression that this is Fortress America, that we are hostile to all these people who want to come here. Not that we have to be a little more careful about who we take in. Not that we took in an awful lot of people in the last 30, 40 years and we have to reduce some of those numbers.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Not that it's not good politics or good policy to not know exactly who's here and there's some undocumented people we don't know about. But he wants us to look as if we're hostile to immigrants. Not too crazy about visitors either, but hostile to immigrants, which is really jaw-dropping for the United States. Maybe we did this a little bit, I guess, in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, those laws were very restrictionist. But the degree to which Trump relishes, and the Trump people, and the whole administration, and now people like Rubio. It's really unbelievable, I mean, that Rubio, who...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, it's super ridiculous to think that one president can void a previous president's pardons. Otherwise, we would have had a lot of that over the years, I suppose. They weren't always popular with the other party. Yeah, it's ludicrous.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
was a very pro-immigration guy, famously that gang of whatever it was in 2013, and who has literally told a very affecting story about his life as the son of immigrants, of refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. and getting asylum in the U.S., in Florida, from Cuba, that he's just fine with all this. I mean, asylum is gone. The refugee resettlement program is gone.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So again, I think what Aaron brings home is just the breadth of the hostility to any notion of the U.S. as a land of refuge, a land of asylum, or a land of hope and opportunity for people from other countries.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, I think Andrew Egger made a good point in Morning Shots this morning, which shows how deeply, deeply Trump wants to go after the January 6th committee people. I mean, who was pardoned at the end of the day? The Biden family? if I recall correctly, Liz Cheney and Representative Thompson and one or two others, I think sort of very much from that world, I guess General Milley.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
We didn't dwell on whether it's working. I just saw some fact that tourism is down some, though, for whatever that's worth. And people are a little freaked out that they could make a slip up on a form and not fill out a new form. They come here routinely on business. One point Aaron makes is that what does work mean? You're a 27-year-old. You come here. You're here for vacation.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
You're going to go to the Grand Canyon. You're going to do this. You're going to hike. You're going to see Las Vegas. But you also flip open your computer and do some remote work. While you're here for your employer back in Berlin, or maybe you're a freelancer, and you're, you know, someone hires you to do something. We can't have that person in this country.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, it's really, yeah, the cruelty is the point, deterring other people from coming in is the point and the self deportation. is the point, right? To get them all to err on the side of just leaving.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And there are people, we've seen reports of people leaving who just are worried they're going to get snatched and they prefer to leave maybe with the rest of their family so they're not separated, as we've now seen instances of. So it's, yeah, and the cruelty, it's so unnecessary, so terrible for this country, I think, not just for our image, but really for our own understanding of ourselves.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And so utterly unnecessary. What's the problem we're addressing here? I mean-
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So Trump's going after the rest, together 97 of them, or of us maybe I should say, I don't know quite how we fit into this list, but it really rankles him that he can't use the whole Justice Department and the authorities of the federal government to go after Liz Cheney and Betty Thompson, I suppose. So it shows how deep The hatred is, I guess, fascistic, as you say.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And they don't definitely got a criminal conviction or anything, which would be another reason you could detain people and deport them.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
We're so far beyond any sense of like, oh, this seems unseemly. Oh, this is kind of contrary to the rule of law. This is kind of contrary to the Constitution. This is kind of contrary to everything. You know, it's just...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
What's the right answer to that these days? Have we discussed this already? If you say you're doing fine, then it seems like you're not sufficiently cognizant that everything is falling apart in our great country. And if you dwell on that, you seem not grateful enough that what is fine and what's family is fine and so forth.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And look, if you said, look, we have to detain him and it's going to take a couple of weeks where we check out his story on the tattoos before he gets the temporary protected status, which is certainly Venezuelans are supposed to get, I believe, if they flee the Venezuelan authoritarian regime. But, you know, OK, that would be maybe the conditions under which he's held aren't great.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And that's, you know, OK, that's kind of the messiness of our immigration system and of the border or something, though. But the idea that we're sending him to this horrible penal colony in El Salvador is beyond belief. And again, why? What was the rush? The guy was detained. I mean, he wasn't out on the streets being a member, allegedly, a member of some gang.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So it's purely about the performative cruelty and the, I guess they think, deterrent effect. And J.D. Vance being able to go on Twitter and say, we're deporting the criminals. And the Democratic judges, I don't know if he says judges, but the Democrats want to keep them here or bring them in or keep them here or something like that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So it's really using these people as pawns for a very low political end. It's really horrifying.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I've gotten radicalized on this. I was never a big pick your battles person. I just think that's, you know, you don't know which ones to pick until you try to fight them. And also it's, If you don't fight one, you are kind of legitimizing it and so forth. And this is a pretty, as we've been saying, a terrible case and the whole use of the Alien Enemies Act and so on.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
They're about, incidentally, in two weeks, I think. They've abrogated. So there are hundreds of thousands of men as well as here. They seem to be doing fine, incidentally. They're great. They love them in South Florida. No one wants to deport them except for Trump, so far as I can tell, except for these 2,000 gang members, if there are that many. And they have abrogated.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
These Venezuelans, temporary protective status, they were let in. And the way TPS, temporary protective status, works is for 18 months. And at the end, you can either extend it or not, depending on what conditions are in the home country. They've shortened that period.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So there are, I think, 200,000 people, Aaron said, mostly in Florida, probably Venezuelans, who will become undocumented on April 3rd, and then who will be subject to deportation. So again, it's...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
They're addressing a non-problem in this case and purposely whipping up sentiments about the invasion and conflating the gang members with the overall community and whipping up sentiments about people of brown skin from what presumes mostly from Central and Latin America kind of flooding this country and invading this country and polluting our blood. I mean, it's really grotesque and terrible.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So I'm with you in the...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
in the rant side of it and the indignation side but which maybe is coloring my political judgment i've been on two text chains this weekend and one zoom in which i've been told that we have to pick our battles defending gang members isn't good the doctor and at brown we should defend her because everyone likes you know physicians at brown and well i don't know 11 the lebanese we're good and maybe they didn't okay whatever or canadian gal from american pie
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Yeah, you're right. I take that point, too. And I guess I got kind of angry, actually, at one of these Zoom calls. It's like, really? I mean, with the American public is so sensitive and is judging every case on so much on the balance here. And it's so important that if it adds 0.3% to Trump's approval rating over the next month, we can't talk about it. I think it's mostly self-defeating.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Obviously, there's some prudence in what fights you pick, but If the Democrats don't pick the overall fight on Trump's immigration policy as being inhumane, indecent, and unlawful, that's just pathetic. And I don't think, incidentally, they would lose that fight. But if they would lose that fight, okay, let's try at least. I mean, we can't just sit here and accept this, I don't think.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
But as I say, I don't quite trust my political judgment because I'm too pretty worked up about it, I guess.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Can I just add one thing on this? I was just thinking, I was on a panel last week, off the record, and all this private conference, Democrats, and I was kind of being lectured. Not lectured, it's not fair. Someone on the panel was saying, Bill, that's very nice that you're indignant, but it's the kitchen table, it's the economic issues, the price of eggs, that's what killed us in 2024.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
That's what people are talking about. We've got to hammer it. I'm, of course, fine with making the economic arguments, and in fact, is if the economy is going to recession, the Democrats don't have to tell people they'll notice. But his particular example was the price of eggs, because that was so popular a while ago.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So I noticed somewhere, maybe I think I'm right about it, the price of eggs is coming down. I don't know why.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So it's like, great, let's just have everyone go and scream about that and then get correctly mocked for – making a huge deal of some temporary spike piece of, I don't know what it was, bird flu or whatever. And there's so much sort of pseudo cleverness about what political arguments to make that is, I think, foolish.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So I was slightly, I was open to the Schumer argument about the CR. I don't think that was crazy that a government shutdown would neither substantively nor politically have worked out particularly well. And It wasn't the hill to fight on. It's just they didn't have a very good fight to make. So I was sympathetic to Schumer on that. Having said that, we both went back and forth a little.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I think you ended up much more critical on Friday, was it?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I'm totally with you, and I might have gone for avoiding the shutdown, but yes, at least show the fight ahead of time. Not in a misleading way. Say we may just have to go ahead because we're over the barrel, but let's be clear what Elon Musk is doing. Here's 36 hours on the center floor or whatever, as you say, through the night. Get some attention, real attention about real problems.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
bad things that are happening including immigration for that matter if you want if they've been in this weekend they could have highlighted some of what was happening so that i'm very much where you are on that and then it's compounded for me over the weekend by two things i guess schumer's book tour i which he's gonna i guess he's actually going to these places or is it a virtual book tour i haven't really focused but either way he's spending i think he's supposed to be going to those places and i think it's going to be ugly for him he's spending tons of time this week
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Charging people admission, as I understand it, to sell his book on antisemitism, which, you know, maybe like when we actually have this administration trying, which includes a bunch of antisemites as well, or it's certainly adjacent to them, is trying to impose authoritarianism on America. You shouldn't be just going around having... you know, promoting his book. It'll sell whatever it sells.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
In any case, I would think, but anyway, it's not a inspiring site.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I think that was the point of it, presumably, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Totally, totally. And then he also gave this interview to the New York Times. I assume he gave it actually before Friday. I was thinking about that, but sometimes Sunday times often is pretty far in advance, in which he just seems totally out of touch. I mean, he's going on about how, I think the Republicans could fall away from Trump, but let's make him a little more popular.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
It happened in 2005 with Bush and And as if it's the situation of the relationship between the president and the party in Congress is comparable. And, you know, but I work out in the gym with these guys. And when you're working out with them on the treadmill, you really, you know, you kind of get a real sense of who they are.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And those Republicans, I mean, it's like you, it's not just cringe, but it is horrifying, honestly, because it does, it is a window into how he's thinking. And I think he should go as leader. I hadn't been there a week ago. I mean, who cares who the majority, the minority leaders in some ways are. He's not necessarily the face of the party. Other people should step up.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
But I actually think he's now an impediment in a way that, like, Jeffries probably isn't. He's just not. I don't know if he's a great leader or not, but he's not. Whereas Schumer now epitomizes out-of-touchness to Trump's authoritarian project. And I don't know. Do you think there's a chance? I've picked up a couple of, you know, glimmers or murmurs about challenges to Schumer.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Totally, totally. I mean, it's just one of many, not to belabor the point, but it's one of many or several ways in which, yeah, the old kind of rules are gone. There were some excesses, God knows, in the past, but they were masked, and the masking itself limited the excess in obvious ways. That's how the world works, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Do you think there's a chance? Have you heard anything? Do you think there's a chance someone will actually literally challenge him this week? It could happen. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, they should skip this. The people who are currently in leadership, certainly Durba, obviously, and Patty Murray, who are both Schumer's age or more. But but I wouldn't mind. I like Lopetroff personally, and I don't know much, but I'm OK with either of them, I suppose, if they want to run. But you know what, Chris Murph, in my opinion.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I don't know the Democratic conference well, and I'm just going to volunteer this irresponsible opinion. Chris Murphy should announce he's challenging him. He should get, if he can, I think you'd need 10 signatures, I understand, to call a special 20% of the conference can request a special meeting of the conference. I don't know what the rules are in terms of the actual challenge.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I suppose at that meeting, someone nominates Murphy to replace Schumer. And so fine, he'll lose, I guess he'll lose, you know, 35 to 15 or something, or however many there are, 35 to 12 or something, maybe less. But A, I think it would show something.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And I don't think it would be, I suppose Schumer wouldn't like it, but I think it would show a certain willingness to say, look, it can't just be business as usual. And if Schumer wins, Murphy can be gracious and defeat and say, good, we're all going to move ahead, but I hope I've sent at least a signal to Chuck that we need to be
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
making our case to the American people a little more aggressively here and not assuming that jogging on the treadmill in the gym is the way to win over our Republican colleagues. So that's my advice to Chris Murphy. I don't know. He watches you, right? He watches you every day.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
This is one of these cases, though. Gene McCarthy wasn't the guy in 67 until he decided no one else is doing it. So if Amy Klobuchar steps up, she'll be the person. Right. I mean, it's not like whatever you were. However, you know, you've been 85 percent forth, you know, out there on the barricades or 65 percent until now. The person who says, I'm sorry, this is unacceptable.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
But once you throw off the mask and it's just, you know, pedal to the metal on retribution and persecution... I mean, where does that end up?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
We need new leadership will be the person, I think.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
But I'll also say that turf will take care of itself, so to speak. If the market's down 10%, it's down 10%. And every Democratic congressman should go around, I guess, telling his constituents, in case you didn't notice, the market's down 10%. And in case you didn't notice, inflation is not going down. And in case you didn't notice, super confidence doesn't seem great, but
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
The one thing with the economy is you don't really need to go around doing this kind of sales job, but whatever. If they want to talk about it, that's fine. If they want it, maybe they should say what they would do that was better. I mean, it's not too early to attack the Trump tax cuts, and I hope they do that. I'm just so annoyed. Again, as you can tell, I can barely speak.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, I had friends, you did too. New York, you know, kind of plugged into the financial world. He's good. He'll be he'll be a voice of moderation and also, you know, grown up person there. The reason he's defending all this, if you realize about the ball, quote, you know, the flat screen TVs is, of course, he's got to defend the idiotic tariffs. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, that's what that's the reason he's backed into that. And he can't just say, look, the president's made a judgment. I think it's going to help the economy. You know, whatever the vaguely respectable thing is. He has to go in this demagogic, what, attack on consumers for caring that they can afford things? TV, is that like a luxury good these days?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
You're not allowed to want to be able to afford a television set so you can watch the NCAAs for the next three weeks? I don't know. I mean, I think it's so tone deaf, and politically it is, I mean – People should attack him, honestly, though.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And I think I hope Bernie Sanders and AOC spend the next week or two bitterly attacking him and making him look like a ridiculous, out-of-touch billionaire, which he certainly seems to be.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
You should go out there with them and do an exclusive interview for Tim Miller for the Bulwark with AOC and Bernie, some of our former conservatives.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
It shouldn't be right. Obviously, in certain areas of policy, it's correct. The president tells the Justice Department, I want you to focus on X and not Y or whatever. But yeah, not in terms of criminal prosecutions. And clearly, that's wrong. what's front and center in everyone's mind.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I need an all-purpose answer in this case.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And Bondi and Kash Patel are all in on just, yes, you say not even pretending that, well, we're weighing the evidence and we think there's a good case here that X is guilty of something. It's just Trump doesn't like them and we're going to find any excuse we can.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I was going to say, to be nice to them, we don't know yet how far they'll go in stretching the excuses, but it turns out they'll go very far, right? I mean, we see this in a bunch of cases. including the law firms, which is pretty astonishing. I mean, these are big law firms. They represented a million clients. Some of them were liberal, liberally inclined or democratically inclined.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Some are the other way. Honestly, I don't think it's occurred to anyone. Maybe Nixon and Watergate was... I can't remember if there was a law firm he went after as part of his going after... Brookings and Daniel Ellsberg, maybe right after Ellsberg's lawyers. But I mean, to publicly just do executive orders.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And again, it's not like if he privately whispered to Pam Bondi, stick into that law firm there. Maybe you can find some law they've broken, you know, some ethics rule they broke, something we could bring them up on in a civil or criminal charge. That's bad. That's bad. But that's at least...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
keeps the fiction that, oh, hey, Justice just happened to discover that this firm was billing client, double billing clients or something. I don't know. There's not even the pretense, as David French said, right? It's just I don't like them. They represented a bunch of my political enemies. It's not even telling Justice Department to look into them or ordering them to.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
It's he personally is, if I'm right about this, stripping them of their security clearances and making their life, making it much harder for them. to represent clients before the government. I mean, it's a personal order. It's not sort of a request to justice to look into it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
She doesn't say we're proud to work in this administration. She has the North Korean thing about her. He's the greatest president ever. Then she doesn't say we should implement the policies of the president of the United States. That would be a little questionable, I'd say, to be saying that formally. But, you know, whatever that could be on the border. She says, what does she say?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
We're proud to work at the direction of Donald Trump. But it really brings somehow personal, you know, it's a personal fealty.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Right. It's not even that, gee, in the executive branch, there should be a separation between the president and the AG or the White House and the AG. This is the personal agenda of Donald Trump that Pam Bondi is using the Justice Department to carry out.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Yeah, that's a good, I hadn't seen the Trump thing. As always with David, that's very tersely, but also intelligently expressed and brings home the point. It really brings home the point.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
Yeah, I think it was a good conversation, not because of me, but he really explained well, I think, the bigger picture, but also sort of the nuts and bolts of how some of it works. I mean, just on this thing, this invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is almost being slid over sometimes because of the
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
sort of defiance, let's just call it, or evasion of the court order, and certainly an attitude of contempt towards the court order. But the invocation of this act is nuts. I mean, and that itself should not, and I believe will not, one hopes will not stand up in court. It's been invoked, used three times, the War of 1812, World War I, World War II. It's for actually about alien enemies in war.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
You know, some German saboteur shows up On the West Coast or something. But anyway, they had to invent a fake war with this Venezuelan gang to justify this. Now, Trump already has pretty broad powers to hold, detain, and to deport people who are not here lawfully.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
And if you find people involved in gang activities, you can, of course, prosecute them just under the normal criminal laws of the United States. You can also detain and deport them. And these people were being detained. I think it's really worth making this point that they weren't like roaming around free in the streets of the U.S., but he wants to deport them to El Salvador.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
So that itself is outrageous. But on the bigger picture, two points. The rule of law is shattered in so many ways in the immigration area or pushed or stretched or distended. And you could say in any one of these cases, some of these cases, well, it's kind of possibly plausible, but you put it all together here. They want no one coming into the country, basically, almost.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1001: Bill Kristol: Give Back the Statue of Liberty
I mean, that sounds like crazily overstated, but it's not that overstated. Certainly no one coming and staying. They're not even crazy about people coming for a while. If there's some tiny risk, they'll stay. Even if their overstay would be because they're hiking around on some trail for an extra week. I mean, right, we're really in a kind of hostility to people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Yeah, but agencies, isn't that one of your favorite themes in JVLs and stuff? And I think it's a good one. We should remind people of that. I don't know. Everyone's a commentator, right? No one, including elected officials who were elected to govern, not to commentate.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I just want to wrecking ball it is. And as Don Moynihan, the professor of political science at Michigan, says in a very good newsletter that I recommend, and he's a sober guy, serious student of public administration, the point isn't government efficiency.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
No, it's a terrific statement. And Danielle Sassoon's letter, she clerked for Scalia, is really excellent. And it's excellent partly because it goes on for eight pages. Some of it's a little dense for a non-lawyer like me, but it really explains just how terrible what's happening is. And so this statement in a shorter, punchier way maybe, does as well. So all credit to them, all honor to them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Meanwhile, Chris Wray, who served as FBI director for, what, seven to eight years, He's just decided to check out. I mean, he's not willing to weigh in on the fate of the agency that he led. He personally appoints, what, five, six people, the people who really run the FBI, and they're all fired.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
The point is to wreck the government and make it more susceptible, wreck the structures, you might say, of the government, of which civil service is such an important part. and make it susceptible to Trump's personalized leadership and really to autocracy. And so all the idiotic things they're doing, if you sort of individually, it's hard to understand.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And maybe he should say a word about these were good public servants, you know, and they shouldn't be fired. And this is very bad for the future of the FBI. And maybe we need to have some oversight of all this. But no, Chris Wray is busy being a gentleman, I suppose, and a gentleman just – I don't even know what he's doing. I mean, what are they all doing?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
That's I guess I'm just, you know, maybe it wouldn't matter. No one likes Chris Reyes, but he was appointed by Trump. Again, he's not exactly a we're not talking about a Biden apparatchik here. So, well, Chris Reyes, welcome on the podcast.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
No, and I keep getting assured by people who are on the Hill. Some of the Republican senators are not very comfortable with the cash per tell vote. They're talking privately to some FBI veterans. Some of them know people in the FBI, obviously, over the years, especially if they're on the relevant committees. They're not happy. But, you know, no one is speaking out.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
The one guy who spoke out, William Webster, the FBI and CIA director from Reagan and Bush way, way long ago, who's 100 years old. And he went to the trouble of writing quite a good letter explaining how damaging it is to have the politicization that we're seeing of the FBI, CIA, and people totally unqualified for the job in those two positions.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I think he's the only person to have held both positions. But again, there are other former FBI and CIA directors. There are other national security officials. And they mostly just decided to let the new administration have a chance to destroy the U.S. government, you know?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Why do they want to make air travel less safe? Why do they want to, you know, damage our nuclear safety inspection regime? But if you think of it more as just taking a wrecking ball to the government, you... I think have a pretty good sense of what's going on. And then I was provoked this morning to write about this particularly.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I mean, Zelensky and the Europeans are doing their best, scrambling to try to mitigate the damage that was done by Trump in the phone call with Putin, and then the subsequent announcements of these that imply, incidentally, that sanctions will be lifted. I mean, Lavrov, who's the Russian foreign minister, Rubio, had a conversation with
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I was going to write actually more about the foreign policy stuff from the weekend, which was the last four or five days, which was so terrible. The IRS headline, I guess, broke last night in the Washington Post and in the New York Times.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And Eric Edelman interpreted this for me yesterday on our little Sunday podcast. We'll put a link into that. It was really good. It was on our sub stack. Thanks to Eric. I mean, you know, there they're sort of implying, at least the Russian readout of the call, that, you know, we have to get rid of these sanctions. We have to have close ties again.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And, of course, Putin and Trump himself said he wants to get together with Putin and so forth. So we're... Just the whole resistance to Putin, which had been held pretty well for three years, incidentally, with a lot of European nations who started off, everyone assumed they're going to have a tough time doing this. They've held pretty firm.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
The international resistance, including Asian allies of ours, totally. I mean, without the US there, it's hard to believe it can hold that much longer. One worries a lot about what happens on the ground in Ukraine. So, I mean, it's very bad what's happened. And the collapse of confidence in the U.S., the Hegseth speech, we're no longer really too focused on Europe. I mean, what's Europe after all?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
It's only the place where two world wars started in the first half of the 20th century that has been kept at peace for the last 80 years, basically, until Putin invaded Ukraine, the largest ground war. in 80 years, which Vance couldn't bring himself to criticize Putin on his speech in Munich and whatever that was, Friday or Saturday, Friday, I guess. It's all so bad.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I mean, it was all going in that direction. And that's why some of us were against Trump and thought it was very, very dangerous to elect him for a second term. But I've got to say, with Musk on the domestic front, and the full America first onslaught on the international front, it's kind of on the What's the way to say this?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
The worst end of what I thought might happen, both domestically and internationally.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Doge is insisting on getting into the IRS and into the very, very sensitive part of the IRS that even IRS commissioners don't have access to, which has your tax returns and my tax returns and 180 million or something other Americans. Trump's tax returns, presumably. Yeah. And Elon Musk's tax returns. And Doge needs to get in there. I don't know why.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
No, it's depressing. It really is depressing and terrible. Another way of putting it maybe, I think Eric might have said this yesterday, is the U.S., which has basically been on the right side, I would say, for 80 years in terms of freedom and democracy and a decent, peaceful society. world order, also a prosperous one, incidentally.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
That's not a trivial consideration, all of which has benefited us. But we've made mistakes. There are times we've been two-coast with dictators, and maybe some of these wars were ill-advised and so forth. But on the whole, we've been directionally, you might say, on the right side. You really have to ask the question, is the U.S. now part of the solution or part of the problem?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
That's where I think it's so demoralizing for people in Ukraine and people in Europe and the And soon people in the Indo-Pacific, I mean, they're thinking about a world in which the U.S. is not basically with them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Sometimes, as I say, hesitantly, too hesitantly from the point of view of some of us, sometimes from the point of view of the more dovish parts of the internationalist coalition, too aggressively, but not on the right side. And I hate to even say that. I mean, I really honestly don't like saying it. I don't want to say it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And look at them, I guess, and have access to them. And they're sort of resisting a little bit of Treasury, and it's up in the air. So it seems like that would be a good moment for everyone to weigh in and say, this is a clarifying moment, perhaps, of what their ambitions are and why it's worth resisting.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
republicans on the hill very excited about this one republican congressman wrote the president is napoleon posting i don't know what's your state of alarm on donald trump posting as if he's uh an autocrat didn't napoleon yeah napoleon would be the best case it also has a certain resemblance to even worse i suppose 20th century autocrats but i don't know napoleon was pretty bad he did cause 20 years of war in europe i mean i do think to the degree it's true and i don't know much about this
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Napoleon said something like that when he took over in the 1790s after the chaos of the French Revolution, not excusing Napoleon, but even thinking of it at that level, what Trump is sort of saying is that the republic's finished, democracy's finished, and I've got to step in and be Napoleon for the next 20 years.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I guess he's a little old for the next 20 years, but those were not a great 20 years. That didn't end up working out great for France or for Europe. But again, the idea that an American president would, even if he's just, quote, just Napoleon, you know, taunting us and, you know, shitposting and all that sort of stuff. It's still awful, of course.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And then, of course, everyone rushes to defend him. And Musk loves it. And these Republican members of Congress love it. They're just against liberal democracy. They're against the liberties of liberal democracy, and they're against the democratic processes of liberal democracy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And they are for autocracy, dictatorship, different levels probably among each other about how far they want to go in suppressing freedoms and just having one guy, one man, or a coterie of plutocrats and oligarchs around the country. But that's what they're for. And they're not even hiding it anymore. It would be nice if some Republican somewhere criticized it apart from... Us ex-Republicans.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And I know the Democrats don't want to react to every tweet. They don't want to swing at every pitch. Some former president, I mean, not to get too earnest, but I don't know, if a current president tweets something like that, I would think. Former presidents, maybe Presidents Obama and Bush could do it together, might say something about this. I mean, again, oh, they wouldn't help.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Why should I do it? But of course, if none of them does it, then ordinary people think, well, I don't know, maybe it's not such a big deal, or maybe we'd be sort of right, or anyway, we shouldn't get too alarmed. But of course, it's consistent with everything they're doing at home and abroad, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I guess I'll come back to this. It's not as if, again, it's not as if... Musk got 73% of the vote or 55% of the vote, right? He got Musk. Trump shows up. Well, that's a Freudian slip. But Trump got slightly under 50% of the vote. They have 53 members of the Senate out of 100, 200 and whatever it is, 18, 19 in the House out of 435, a tiny margin, half the governorships and so forth.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
It sounds as if there aren't plenty of Americans who aren't on board with this. And there are some Americans who voted – Foolishly, in my view, for Trump, who probably aren't on board what he's doing at home or abroad. Incidentally, half the Republicans in Congress voted afraid to Ukraine less than a year ago. So I don't think the opposition is impossible.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I don't think we're in a kind of horrible situation of every person who dissents has to be a genuine hero or martyr or something like that. But people do need to take the threat seriously and be serious about their opposition. And they will have endless debates about the right way to oppose. And I'm not sure I know. I really am somewhat bewildered in some ways.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
But I got to think just opposing a lot is better than not opposing a lot. I like such a simple-minded view of this, you know. Opposing across the board actually is better than being really cute and selective. That, I think, is the part that a lot of the professional Democrats don't agree with.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
You cannot just sit there and look at people bullying and just doing things that are obviously not complicated policy issues, but just contrary to people's basic freedoms and contrary to basic decency. Once you accept that, you are at a very slippery slope, I think. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Yeah, and God forbid they should actually study it for 30 days and see whether they can cut 10% or maybe increase 10% in some parts or reorganize the place. There's none of that, of course. They show up. They give, I guess, each supervisor 200, if I read this correctly, 200 characters, not 200 words.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
total characters like on a tweet to explain what each of these employees are doing these are the probationary employees which mean people who've been hired in the last year or two or people who've assumed new jobs in the last years i understand it so they could be quite senior some of them they don't have civil service protections they're easier to fire they just went in and fired them i mean it's such a wrecking ball it's so unserious about any of the things government does this one i guess was even this was a bridge too far there was a public outcry and some congressional outcry and experts saying what what are you doing
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And they did retreat, which incidentally is a good sign, which suggests to me that if there's a little more of an outcry in all these areas, including by the Democratic Party, maybe they would retreat a little more.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I remember it was like a little bit of a conservative thing in the 70s and 80s to object to the change from Washington's birthday to President's Day. I guess they were sort of mushing together Lincoln and Washington. And then, of course, it had to be on a Monday. But yes, insofar as it sort of implies that we equally respect all presidents. It's very bad, and I'm glad you've decided.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I do think, though, that, I mean, the Congress, of course, the Congress is controlled by Republicans, which is a huge problem. And the media can do its bit. The civil servants themselves can do a lot and probably should be encouraged to do as much as they can safely do, really, to publicize what's happening and to explain how dangerous it is. But there is this thing called Congress.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
They do have oversight of the executive branch. They're even organized into committees that kind of by departments that oversee the different departments. There's a subcommittee of the finance committee in the Senate and the ways it means committee in the house that oversees the IRS.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And I don't know, it seems to me just, you know, that maybe the ranking Democrat on that committee should be just screaming and yelling on every platform we can get onto. He or she can get onto and screaming and yelling at the Republican members and for failing to do any oversight. And that should be the equivalent on all these places, whether it's the FAA or the CDC and FDA and all that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I said this to some Democrat over the weekend. I said, well, they're doing town halls, you know, and they're really laying the predicate for fighting on the budget. which is coming out. It's really all about winning back the House in November 2026, which I don't disagree with in a way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
That's why these town halls are so important, Tim, because if you do a town hall on February 17th of 2025, it's really going to help you win back the House in 2026. I think you get a little more punch, actually, out of making this a huge national story of how they're destroying these important
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
government agencies that help us you know fly safely and take drugs with confidence that they work and check epidemics and make sure our tax returns are treated professionally but what do i know maybe this town hall where they have some happy talk with 80 people is really better i don't know
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I'm glad you've declared the bulwark policy of not recognizing President's Day, right? I mean, if we could all just adopt whatever names we want, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Right, and you could show up with veterans, obviously, who benefited from this crisis hotline in your district or not in your district. But I agree, it's partly the volume. It's partly you've got to fight. I mean, the media likes to cover fights. People like to watch fights. They don't like to watch, you know, press conferences.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
And I love the Democrats, all this, you know, well, we can't swing at every pitch, you know. I mean, they're so busy not swinging at every pitch, they're taking— called third strikes, if I can torture this metaphor here. I mean, it's really ridiculous. So swing at every pitch.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
You'll miss a few, but they've talked themselves into a kind of bizarre form of overthinking where they don't take them on and they've got to preface everything they say. Well, of course, there's probably waste there. I mean, I wouldn't question that. They don't know that there's waste there. For all we know, the FAA is understaffed. The IRS is understaffed.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
That was pretty convincingly shown in the debates over the last two, three, four years when Biden tried to increase it. It was a pretty engaged issue and experts weighed in.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Not much question that more IRS agents properly governed and controlled, not by doge creeps, would help generate more revenue and a fairer auditing of taxes and so forth, especially wealthy people who are getting away with some stuff. but anyway, the Democrats are so defensive, so hesitant, so overthinking. I, okay. I've, this is the problem.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
If I talked to actually a few Democrats this weekend, it kind of, my head's exploding, but I've got to, I've got to calm down.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Right. Put the ball in play. Right. You know, they could be errors. They could turn out to have done something very stupid, like they apparently did with the nuclear safety officials. So you don't know until you challenge it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
I'll totally agree. Obviously Patel will be really, and then to confirm Patel after what we've seen now, of course makes it even worse because you can't pretend I didn't know what he was going to do. He's done, they've done what he wanted them to do. And he probably lied about whether they knew about what they were doing. Yeah. They are senators on the other hand.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
They do have appropriations authority power. That's true. And he also could say, and incidentally, when the budget comes up, and it could be the first reconciliation bill, which I guess could be pretty soon, right? And then there's the CR for the government shutdown a month from now, a little less than a month from now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
You can put things in riders and bills that say no money should be spent to get rid of XVIHs or we need to have this minimum number of XVIHs. It's not like Congress doesn't have quite a lot of say on this. They don't even seem to think of that. It's like they're so pathetic in terms of exercising.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
When I was at the education department, granted a long time ago, I mean, if we had moved one person in Louisiana where she didn't want to go, he or she didn't want to go from one research institute to another. You know, like phone calls from the members of Congress, the senator's chief of staff. You reverse that right. Well, sir, we did it according to the book. I don't care.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Sometimes we would resist them. Sometimes we wouldn't. But I mean, they've sort of totally forgotten that they have quite a lot of clout if they would exercise it. But of course, the Republicans are just won't take on Trump or any of Trump's agents, apparently. And the Democrats don't have much power, to be fair. But they're also not screaming enough to put the Republicans on the spot.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
Right. I mean, these people do have agency. They're pretty important people, actually. They have more agency than most of us. But everyone has some agency. Actually, Rene DiResta, in this conversation that's online, conversations with Bill Kristol about the internet, makes this point, too, about regular people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Taking A Wrecking Ball to the Government
You know, when he talks about something going viral, well, people choose to hit the button that allows it to go viral, and they can choose not to, and they can choose to tweet and retweet things and so forth. Now, Musk is putting a thumb on the scale of the algorithm, so people don't have that much agency in some of these cases.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
Can't get a lawyer, but it takes out the immigration system so terrible. And he's like the guy, the father-in-law is this big Trump supporter, is a belligerent. They're not going to deport you. If they're going to deport you, they're going to have to come through me.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
which I found particularly, I've got to say, I don't mean to, you know, these are individuals, and I don't know, maybe the quote was out of context. I found particularly infuriating, I must say. You know what? They don't have to come to him. And if ICE wants to deport him, unfortunately, he's not going to, I mean, he's a kind of a prepper. He's got guns and all this kind of stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
So I don't know, maybe he will get in a shootout with some ICE agents, God forbid. But I mean, it's just the whole thing. But anyway, it's a very moving piece about this one DACA recipient. There are 10 million of them. So I'd read that, and look, how did this guy, the father-in-law, come to vote for Trump? And so he describes why he did.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
It's all MAGA lies, MAGA conspiracy theories, wild exaggerations, playing on anxieties that a lot of immigrants have come into that part of Georgia they work in. chicken processing plants and so forth has caused some tensions and problems. But again, sort of like the Ohio thing, wild exaggeration of the problems. He seems in his own life to be doing okay, so far as I can tell.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
And he's got a son-in-law who is actually a DACA recipient. Mitt Romney sort of admires Trump, you can sort of tell from that clip, you know, for bringing in the working class and the middle class. But an awful lot of those people he brought in, he brought in not because he explained that his policies would really help them economically, but
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
It'll be fine. I'm going to be fine. We'll do our best here. I guess there was kind of enough news to talk about for short of whatever happens in the 12 hours until Monday morning.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
He brought them in by appealing to worse than appealing to by magnifying and capitalizing on and amplifying whatever xenophobia and bigotry was there already. I was angry after reading it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
The looking up to Trump, which is very common. Well, look what he did. It's impressive. Three times nominee, twice winning. Mitt Romney got 47, a little more maybe, percent of the vote against Barack Obama finishing his first term. Pretty impressive. brought the country back from the depths of a terrible recession. Donald Trump got 49.8% of the vote against Kamala Harris succeeding Joe Biden.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I'm going to just stipulate that Barack Obama was a stronger candidate than Kamala Harris, having only 100 days to run after Biden pulled out. Why does Romney even feel defensive? He ran as good a race as Trump. I mean, just empirically, you know, he got two percent less, two and a half percent less. It's not like, you know, he was humiliated, lost the football game 52 to zero. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I mean, he did a little bit less well than Trump. I don't know. I just saw the whole kind of semi admiration and semi almost awe for Trump is very that is it helps Trump, though.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
Yeah, totally. I like fake nicey-nicey shit. That should be the title of this podcast. We denounce fake nicey-nicey shit.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
He's president. He's sort of... Sort of still head of the Democratic Party, not really, but he could, in fact, say some things that would remind people of how dangerous he's been. He knows the executive branch better than anyone else. Well, sort of, or at least once did and still knows some of it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
He could say a few things that would make Trump's life more difficult, I should think, going forward and show. I mean, I don't know. I tweeted after reading that New York Times piece. I'm so confused. I tweeted, I X'd and blue skied after reading that Times piece because I was so just furious really and moved by the piece, very well reported.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I said, I don't know, can Biden not pardon all the DACA recipients? I suppose he can't. I mean, I don't quite know. Being undocumented isn't really a crime, so it's not like pardoning someone for a crime. On the other hand, I've done zero research on this. I'm just making all this up. Carter did pardon or amnesty, didn't he, all the draft avoiders who had gone to Canada and so forth?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
Why is it that different to pardon people here and to say, cheat them as if they'd been documented? Anyway, I don't know. Couldn't they be thinking of things they could do to help doing a little more than they're doing to cushion the country from the damage Trump wants to do?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
So, I mean, Jack is very cautious and judicious. I mean, honestly. a kind of a balanced law professor. Not everything needs to go as badly as it might, but I would say, given that he, I don't know, is a, I would say a touch more conservative than we are, but I think he's, he believes strongly in executive power, but anyway, he knows the executive branch extremely well, both justice and DOD.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
And, uh, Yeah, it's alarming. I think if you know who Jack Goldsmith is, if you know how careful he's been, if I can put it in a simple and crude way, not to sound like us quite over the last two years. And I don't mean this. Jack is a serious guy. It's not like he's sitting around thinking, I don't want to sound like Tim and Bill. It's just that this is who he is.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
But if you know who he is and you watch that, you see that even someone who kind of wants to see whether there might be a case to be made for some of these reforms and civil service stuff and executive authority, and after all, the president is elected and people report to him, he is pretty alarmed.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I'd say especially interesting- In particular, the Schedule F. We didn't get into that quite as much. The thing he seemed personally most alarmed about was national security, interestingly. Fair amount about the rule of law stuff from DOJ, but-
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
Really, the national security implications of having Patel at FBI and then having a DOD that's dysfunctional, I think he's always been somewhat concerned about national security. His work in 2002-2003 was kind of post-9-11 work. It was also rolled back and got in a lot of big fights with the Bush White House by rolling back the Jadu torture memo.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
So he's not some kind of mindless hawk, do as much as you can. But he is seriously concerned about national security, and he's very worried about just what – Four years of these guys being totally silly and demonstrative and just ran. I don't like the FBI, so we're getting rid of the counterintelligence division. How much real damage that could do to our national security.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I mean, he's been reading warning shots, obviously, and also my ex and blue sky feeds. And I've made this point. I don't think it's quite the same in both parties. And I think, honestly, it's the political power side of it that's most scary. I mean, it could be bad to have so much inequality of wealth. It could be more progressive taxes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
And maybe we need more antitrust to break up companies and all that. In this respect, there's not much similarity between Biden and Trump. I mean, the just totally shameless Elon Musk and Trump and the dealing, as we've seen, the courting favor and appointing, I mean, the meshing, that is more like Orban or aspects of Putin.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
and uh is super dangerous so i'm glad bernie's come around to the bulwark point of view on this you know i wonder if bernie ever used i wonder if he used to use the word oligarchy a lot that was that's sort of a old-fashioned word i don't know if the marxists really use it that much millionaires and the billionaires i mean yeah i don't know we'd have to go back to the to the transcripts from his 16 speeches i don't know it's a good question i guess what i really wanted to play it was um
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
You know, the Democrats, I think, and I'm no expert on this at all, but need to go back and really look at FDR. I mean, they all want to go back to Clinton or they want to go back to Obama, which is understandable. They were in modern America. FDR was an awful long time ago by now. But he combined, I mean, I think of him, I always admired him, grew up admiring him, not knowing that much.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
But, you know, he won the war, obviously, and got us out of the Depression and saved capitalism. That was kind of the standard approach. semi-conservative defense of FDR that unlike, you know, he protected by strengthening guardrails, limiting the abuses and so forth, he actually ended up saving capitalism. And I think FDR said this himself or certainly his defenders did at the time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
But FDR also used a lot of what would today be called the class warfare rhetoric and denouncing the malefactors of great wealth And had policies that were, in some cases, pretty radical. So I think there's a way to combine a kind of healthy, anti-oligarchic, semi-populism with pretty free market, pro-market, non-huge government program type policies, I think.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I mean, the knock-on effects, the intimidation effects going forward are I mean, this was a very – the lawyers I've talked to, for whatever it's worth, and I think this is the consensus. Trump has lost many lawsuits like this. You don't have to show that every word you say on a television show or on a podcast is literally and absolutely correct.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
All my moderate friends, of course, think, oh, my God, AOC is the face of the party. I've got to say what I've seen her. If you're going to oppose Trump, why not AOC? I don't want her to run the country. I'm not sure I want her to chair some actual important committee if the Democrats ever win Congress back. This is oversight, so it's entirely an oversight of the executive branch.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
It's a, let's call it, adversarial investigative committee. She's not going to be making policy in most areas. So my instinct, Jerry Connolly is incidentally the congressman for right around here, so I'll probably hear from his staff and stuff, but my instinct is to think, why not do AOC? I mean, and people are freaking out on the center about, oh my God, can you imagine AOC?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
So what if she's head of oversight for two years at the end of the world? And she's pretty good at making these arguments, I think. But what do you think? Don't you have more, I have a little more faith that AOC will go after the worst things the Trump administration does than Jerry Connolly.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
You have to show that you were – first of all, it's not clear that Trump was defamed. I mean, people have never heard this charge before. What are the damages to Trump? But leaving that aside, you would have to show, what, is it reckless disregard? Or, you know, that has to be sort of like Stephanopoulos was cautioned, timid us before the show, don't say the word rape, but he said it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
Yeah, so just give AOC oversight, and then we'll all support Richie Torres against AOC in the 2028 Democratic primary. It's going to be a good primary, right? Two young members of Congress.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
We're skipping a few generations here. Didn't you get that memo? We're going down. We're going down soon.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I have no secrets and no thoughts except to say, Two people randomly over the last 24 hours, just texting with them or chatting with them, actually, about other things, social, personal, family stuff, have both said, I don't know, it seems like there seems to be something there. And they're not thinking it's some deep state whatever. Aliens. Yeah, aliens, right. So I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I haven't followed it enough. It feels like there's maybe enough that isn't literally just airplanes landing at Newark and at LaGuardia, or maybe it is literally just airplanes and FedEx drones or Amazon drones delivering stuff. Maybe it is literally that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
If that's in the deposition documents, I doubt it is, then maybe ABC was right to cave and pay $15 million to the Trump library, which doesn't exist yet, I guess, and $1 million of legal fees. But this kind of, as you say, preemptive capitulation... is just terrible. I mean, Disney has a very big legal department. They have access to extremely good law firms.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
If they felt they could defend this, I think every other, not just broadcast entity, but other places that have people who are discussing Trump on any medium, I'm thinking about university councils, the chilling effect will be
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
very great which is the whole point of these civil lawsuits and it does remind one i think some smart people said this a few months ago a few weeks ago when we were all correctly very upset about cash patel at the fbi it's not only the criminal things he could do from the fbi it's the civil lawsuits that trump and elon musk and peter teal and everyone can fund they to try to bankrupt people intimidate people and they got they've already gone after our friend olivia troy they've gone after others and
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
At participating McDonald's for a limited time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I don't know. I worry that now it's going to be just open the floodgates. I will also point out, finally, it turns out that Susie Wiles, the incoming White House chief of staff, had dinner with the head of ABC News Monday night at Mar-a-Lago.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
I was in touch with a scholar of, like Ann Applebaum, a different person, but a scholar of European politics and of Hungary. Orban did a lot of this in Hungary. And of course, Trump's tried to do it over the years. The American system isn't that friendly to defamation suits for public figures, and he's lost almost everyone. But Orban shut down plenty, or
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
gained control or certainly intimidated opposition media in Hungary. And one I've been saying, you've been saying, I think, well, US isn't Hungary. Let's not overdo this. It's not going to be that easy to intimidate everyone in the US and use the legal system in the US the way Orban used it in Hungary. But here we are. And again, this isn't even a Trump-appointed judge doing anything.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
This is the company. Again, not just going into hiding a little bit, maybe dragging out the case and not making a robust defense of free speech. This is conspicuously and visibly paying up before the inauguration. I mean, this is paying protection money or whatever. And it just, the message it sends to everyone else is not only do you have to not offend Trump, you need to pony up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
And indeed, aren't they ponying up for the inaugural committee now, all these billionaires?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
What would the damages have been? It would not have been much more than $15 million. I mean, how much damage did this interview with Nancy Mays do to Donald Trump's reputation, given that he lost the civil case against D.G. and Carol? You don't have to make a big deal. Disney doesn't have to go to Soapbox. ABC doesn't have to go to Soapbox.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
They just say, look, we're going to let this go to the judge. We're going to take depositions. You know, we want this. We hope it works out quickly. And we're not trying to make a point here. But we defend our people when they say something in good faith. They didn't have to grandstand on behalf of free speech.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
But again, this is a whole different world from just quietly litigating the case and maybe giving a million dollars to the Trump inaugural fund, right? This is a very conspicuous situation. unnecessary preemptive collapse on a core first amendment issue. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
For me personally, just reading about it last night, I felt the worst I've felt since November 5th. I felt the most ominous fire bell in the night or whatever term you want since November 5th. Obviously, the appointments of the nominations of Patel and other things are pretty bad and ominous and other things Trump and his people have said. But I felt like this was really a moment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
It's not just that they're going to try to do things in the government they shouldn't do. It's that the whole, And what's not the government, corporate America, civil society, if you want to use a fancy term, is preemptively capitulating. You can have a government that's bad, and that's bad, obviously.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
But if everyone else is kind of not going along with their attempts to intimidate, there's probably certainly some ways limited damage they could do and other ways they could do great damage versus the government of the United States. But still, this really, I think, just takes it to another level in terms of civic or social damage. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
God forbid he actually announced that he's going to try to do something. Maybe not within the Republican Party, because I share his pessimism about that. but in other areas to build up a non-MAGA agenda for the country, a liberal centrist agenda, or recruit young candidates to it. I mean, something, right? I mean, if he wants to retire, I guess that's fine. But again, why doesn't he retire?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
Just stand by his previous comments. Does he really have to say, well, I've worked with J.D. Vance since then and stuff? Really? What have they been working on there in the Senate? I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
You sent me a couple of quotes from Romney. I hadn't watched anything this morning and hadn't even known he was on these shows. And the other one, I think, was that you have to admit that Trump has brought in the middle class and the working class to the Republican Party, something like that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
And I read that just as I had finished reading a New York Times article, big New York Times article, which is online, I assume in today's print times. Eli Zaslow, the reporter, I think, was from Georgia. Very moving about a guy who's been here since he was five years old, family, hard worker, churchgoer, wonderful person, undocumented. His mother came across the border to work in Georgia.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
She also seems to have been, maybe both parents, I can't remember, were hard workers. He married a girl from Rome, has a father-in-law who voted for Trump. And it's caused some strains because he's very worried. They're very worried about him being deported and they're spending money on lawyers. They don't have that much extra, any extra money.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Fake Nicey-Nicey Sh**t
And it's causing just terrible psychological distress on them and their little kids. The father-in-law is sort of, well, I'm, You're not the kind of person they want to deport. And so according to the article, the 40-year-old or so DACA recipient, Dreamer Type, says, well, I don't know. He says he wants to deport us, and I have to prepare for that in case it were to happen. But what do I do?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Yeah, I've been around Washington for 40 years, almost 40 years now, and I've never really discussed my melanin count or whatever. Melanin, is there a melanin count? I don't know, whatever it is. That's the guy I really focused on for some reason. I don't know. Yeah, it's wonderful, Lady Elon Musk. This was in the course of obviously...
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, the real ramifications, I think lots of scientists are talking about, and they have a certain self-interest, sure. But at the end of the day, you need buildings and electricity and support staff to run a lab. And that's what the overhead goes to. Now, maybe it doesn't need to be 50% or 60%, as it is in some cases. Fine. You know what?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Go to Congress, which has this bar and which said, we want to make this decision and say, let's go to 40% or let's go to... 40% for universities that have massive endowments and 50% for everyone else or whatever, you know, they don't do that. They cut everything to 15%. And every I've talked actually to happen to know a few people in this field. And these are people who aren't that political.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And they think this will just cut NIH. were supported biomedical research by a lot. Jeffrey Flyer, who's the dean of Harvard, was former dean of Harvard Medical School, might know very slightly, but is a pretty moderate conservative type in the Harvard context. He's been sort of a critic of excessive DEI and
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
and so forth, and of what's happened on campus in the last year and a half since October 7th. Very well respected. I wouldn't be surprised if he's voted Republican half the time in elections, too. Says this is insane, basically. No sane government would do this. NIH's budget has gone up and down a bit over the years, but basically it's what it was 20 years ago.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
There's no evidence that it's like there wasn't massive, massive money shoveled to it. And God knows what they're spending it on. Do they have one or two stupid, you know, foolish or allegedly foolish DEI-ish programs? Maybe, but most of it is going to pretty hardworking researchers who are trying to solve diseases, you know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
So I think the actual substantive effect of these cuts is going to be very real. A, and B, politically, I think there will be a big backlash. And, you know, a lot of people work in these, supported by these grants, not just the top tier doctors and researchers, a lot of lab techs, and as I say, support staff, keep the buildings going and so forth. So, and they're all over the country.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And most of the grants don't go to Harvard and Yale and so forth. And Katie Britt, the Republican senator from Alabama, particularly close friend of yours, I believe. Haven't you been on her case a few times? I don't know. She used to be a normal Republican when she worked for Rick Shelby.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
remember that white supremacist they fired for like two minutes and on friday that kid yeah who had tweeted that he was he was a racist before being a racist was cool and musk was on the first to say he's got to be reinstated and i said it quite makes sense musk has no problem with white supremacism something like that and that led to him saying i'm white and i'm the stupidest person around i don't care what he said something like that you're a sub-tard i think sometimes that was nice that's also it's good that the way they they take to i mean i don't even know what that's not a word i guess but
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, what I do know is that liberals who've been somewhat bringing their hands somewhat understandably about what can we do and our issues, our messages aren't popular. I'm on so many of these, too many of these text groups, honestly, it's driving me a little crazy. But anyway, especially with lawyers, they're all trying to be PR experts and so forth. But you know what?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
This is a pretty easy message. They are cutting biomedical research in the U.S., which is done all across the country. and is saving a lot of lives, has led to a lot of medical progress. And you remember Congress has to stand up and stop it, and stop it now. Maybe the courts will slow it down also. That includes your Republican members of Congress.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I think it's a very easy issue for liberals, for Democrats. And it's one of several like this, where they just need to overcome a little bit of overthinking. And in this case, they also have to overcome, and I talk about this a bit in the morning shots, they're like, oh my God, the government's unpopular. Well, is it really that unpopular?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
First of all, there are plenty of polls showing people want government to do all kinds of things like NIH or like bargaining to get the price of prescription drugs down. And this cuts a little bit against our past, but I think it's also worth saying, but you and I know this from our past where this was always a tough sell, cutting government isn't that popular.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, government may not be popular, but taking a sledgehammer to government is even less popular. No one has won a presidential campaign really running against government since Reagan, I would say, in 1980. There have been people who said, we have to reform government. Of course, we have to do this and that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And sledgehammer cuts carried out by an unpopular, unelected billionaire. I mean, Trump understood this. He understood this as a candidate, as you said earlier. But also, he didn't do any of this in 2017. He tried like for two minutes in 2017. He realized, oh, this is going nowhere. And he never said a word about this for the next three years that I can recall.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And that's true of a lot of parts of government. He presided over AID. He presided over NIH. And that was actually pretty smart of him. And it kept his numbers at a reasonable – people could tell themselves he's not really damaging much out there, right? I can vote for him because of immigration or the border or wokeness or something.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
So this is a very dangerous path for them politically and a very promising, I believe, opportunity for Democrats and liberals.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
But retard is a word and a word that some people find offensive, understandably, in discussing people who have various medical issues. They love using, you know, this is an interesting thing about, I think, MAGA world and Musk world, right? They love using words that are offensive words. to offend people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
That's a good point. Just like when Trump jokes about those treasury bills, there's something wrong with some. Didn't you say that over the weekend or something? We're discovering some fraud there too. Oh, great.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Let's just call it a question that there's fraud in US treasuries, which will totally destroy the world, the world financial system and our ability to be the backbone of it and benefit a ton from the fact that people hold trillions of treasuries all over the world with a lot of confidence. Now, I mean, there is a kind of recklessness here that It's just one last point on the spending itself.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
So they're cutting discretionary spending with a hacksaw. That's the minority of total federal spending, about half it's defense and half non-defense. I think that's about right. And, you know, they're not touching so far entitlements, which, I mean, if you were a serious person about this, like Paul Ryan was, you would actually try to figure out how to save money on Medicare, Social Security.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Like that's the front of Trump's mind that that's a mistake. So Musk isn't going after that. And we'll see if they go after it in their budget. And Sally, one thing that's going to make this, there will be a lot of court cases, which I agree with you, politically might damper it a little, you know, take the edge off because they'll be delayed. On the other hand, it'll keep in the news quite a lot.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And so these cases will be scattered all over the country, I think. I mean, if you're in Tennessee, you might want to bring a case. You know, Tennessee farmers might want to bring a case in a district court there and so forth. So that... And it keeps it alive politically. And there will be a budget, I guess, unless we totally, you know, the OMB will present a budget in the next month or so.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Let's have down in black and white. This will be Trump, not Elon Musk's doge guys. How many spending cuts Trump thinks are necessary and reasonable in all these different programs, right? Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And the next election is not for Trump himself, who might be able to overcome all these problems because he can do his magic with, you know, cultural issues and all that. But it's going to be for various Republican members of Congress. And there is still, and I know everything's so polarized these days and every local election is a national election.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I think people still expect in Tennessee that their senator or member of Congress will watch out for the well-being of the farmers. And if they really don't or can't or don't choose to, they control both houses of Congress after all. I think you do get some percent of the 2%, 3%, 6%, 7%, 8% side. You know what? Maybe it's better to have a Democrat there who will keep an eye out for me.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, Democrats can run a very old-fashioned campaign.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
in a way easy campaign if they could just like stop overthinking everything and get themselves energized on kind of a classic democratic protecting the people against this these billionaires who want to take away all these programs that help you it'll be intriguing to watch i think it's going to get a lot a lot dicier musk has this idea that you know he went into twitter
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Anyway. So then I, yeah. So he said, I'm too stupid to be a, I proved that whites aren't Supreme. So I was so stupid. And, uh, And then, yes, and then one of his many, many, I guess, I never look at the follows, but... Susan made the mistake of looking at them for five minutes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
No, I think you said it all well. I don't have any disagreement. Again, for me, the question is politically. Democrats are a little mixed on some of these questions. They don't mind some tariffs. They have old labor, hostility to free trade. But there are some of them that are pretty unambiguously, I think, going to just damage democracy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Not just consumers, incidentally, but other businesses that depend on steel and aluminum, for example, to make things here in the U.S. or to make things partly here in the U.S. and partly in Mexico and Canada, which is the case with a lot of things these days. So I think you have a lot of small businesses affected, maybe some big businesses.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And very important, I think, for Democrats, they just need to get out there and show up at these places. I really don't understand what they're doing. I mean, they seem to be having Chuck Schumer's doing idiotic demonstrations before some government agency, flapping his arms up and down.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
They should just be traveling all around the country, each to their own district constantly and just showing up at every with that farmer in Tennessee. I guess there's a Democratic representative there, but they can go across the border if they want, you know, or some challenger.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, a very high percentage, you'll be surprised to hear this, Tim, a very high, surprisingly high percentage of Elon Musk's followers on Twitter are racist and anti-Semites. I don't know how that happened. You know, it's just like weird how they found him, you know?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
No, I think it's – I mean, the three weeks is a very important point. And we should – They're just going to do more of it, but they are, I think, moving in that direction. And also, it doesn't have to be Democratic members of Congress.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
It can be, I mean, some of the more attractive spokespeople would be the leaders of various, you know, all kinds of people from civil society and from business and from not-for-profits and so forth. And they can also make the point directly.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Also, how does removing taxes on Social Security incentivize them to get back in? Are you still going to get, I guess, Social Security now, so I know a tiny bit about the program? I guess if I get it and don't have to pay taxes on it, that's nice, but it doesn't have, in fact, it gives me more income without having to work now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
So yeah, but it's going to be very popular to say, let's send a lot of 70-year-olds out into the workforce, but let's not let any hard, we got to deport 400,000 hardworking Venezuelans who fled socialist tyranny, who are working hard and have a very low crime rate and et cetera. we have to deport them because, because why? Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I'm sort of disinclined to go to the Kennedy Center for the next four years if Trump is chairman and president. It's just the vanity. I mean, it's, of course, idiotic and silly, except there's something slightly North Korean about it, don't you think? The supreme leader is also going to be supreme leader of the cultural institutions.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Yeah, banning the TV shows for about six months from that. That'll be the next thing he and J.D. Vance decide is very important to do for the sake of America's youth. I mean, I really want, incidentally, on the transgender issue, for example. They're very close to just banning, you know, like any representation of such a human, I think, in American public life.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, it's really grotesque what they're doing there. And again, Democrats, I want to talk, you know, some aspects of that issue are more complicated, I think, with sports and with, you know, medical care, maybe for young people. But the actual attempt to just, I mean, you talk about cancel culture, they are literally trying to cancel from American public life a bunch of Americans, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And it's really grotesque. And again, I think I got to think all this stuff adds up at some point and people do not want to live in that kind of country.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
So people, you know, vaguely and tangential to that world, you might say historian types and all this. scholars, and they all respect her a lot, partly because she actually knows what she's doing in terms of running the archives, which is not trivial.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And partly for the reasons you said, she stood up to Biden, but she also alerted, I think, the Justice Department when there were not documents, classified documents that should have been there in the archives from Trump. That's why Trump hates her. I mean, Gore, who is a very, I think, bad figure, I think he's had a presidential personnel and is very much of a MAGA, you know,
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Leave no prisoners and obey no laws type notified her, but I'm not mistaken in her, in his statement, he said at the direction of president Trump is he doesn't have the right to fire him. She is too high a level. And so that's actually interesting, right? Trump, you know, there'll be a certain amount of, well, Trump didn't know that these lower level types were doing this, but he wants her gone.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Who knows? Incidentally, maybe it's more just revenge, but also he probably does want to control what's in those archives is used over the next four years. There's stuff in those archives from the Biden administration. There's stuff in the previous Trump administration. And, you know, he may, he has, may have an interest in putting some stuff out and putting some of it out and
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
partial form and misleading form anyway who knows but just a minor example but a good one of the utter politicization of everything all right you have any final thoughts before we get to the super bowl no it's kind of a boring game it seemed to me it was a boring game
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And happy for Jonathan. Jonathan B. Last, even though he is an Eagles fan. Just one last tiny tidbit to add to your point. Someone made this point on Twitter, I think. I think other quarterbacks might have wanted to go out there on the field to take the last snap so they can be in the center of the celebration. He presumably, the coach made this decision, presumably he was fine with it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I think it was, I was a racist before then. Racism was cool or something like that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
They sent the backup quarterback, who I think has played not at all this season, basically, or almost not at all, right? And whose name I don't remember, out there to take this, not just that snap, but to run the last series of downs when it didn't matter anymore. As a nice gesture, he gets to play in a Super Bowl, right? And, you know, not everyone would have done that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I think that was maybe also a bit of a tribute to Hurst. It seems like a pretty classy team altogether. Actually, both teams seem pretty, you know, the Chiefs somehow, the people have irrational dislike for the Chiefs, but it seems like both teams are pretty impressive. A lot better than the, the football teams we have are a lot better than the government we have, you know?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I just peaked, P-E-A-K. Elon said I was peak white, so I'm just saying. Oh, you're peak. I'm peak.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I don't think that's a good thing. I'll go out on a limb and say that. And also, I hadn't really thought through your point about, thought about your point about, well, who did fire him? I suppose maybe Susie Wiles, who we both knew back in the day, I guess. It's a nominal chief of staff, not to be offensive, but I mean, I think it's fair to say a nominal chief of staff at the White House.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Spent, you know, fired, thought it was a bad idea to have that guy, you know, prominently on staff there for Doge. And her dicta lasted about 10 minutes, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
J.D. Vance is such a disingenuous creep. I mean, I guess he went to Yale Law School where maybe he learned a certain amount of this pseudo-sophisticated disingenuity, if that's a word. But You know, of course, the issue in all these cases is whether it is a legitimate exercise of executive power or not, whether it does follow the law, whether it does violate constitutional rights. J.D.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Vance is very well aware of this. He has supported, I mean, supported in what he has said and
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
has talked a lot about it, actually, the merits of lawsuits challenging the government's effort to regulate Christian bakers in Colorado or allegedly deprive anti-abortion protesters of free speech when there have been issues of maybe excessive, I don't even know, you know, curtailing of their shouting right near abortion clinics or whatever. So J.D.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Bass is well aware that judges can step in to vindicate constitutional rights and also to ensure that the executive is actually following the law. And he's been for doing that when it's his favorite groups that are, disadvantaged by a perhaps hostile executive or one who doesn't care much about those groups. And now he's pretending that this is just judges acting illegitimately or arbitrarily.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, they can appeal. They are appealing, incidentally, to appellate courts. And they have a pretty friendly Supreme Court up there. If that Supreme Court doesn't think these things are legal or constitutional, it's probably a bit of a tell. But I agree. They're laying the challenging the courts when they want to. I think I've been in some conversations about that over the weekend.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
People kind of expect that to be a huge, dramatic, you know, we are taking on the courts moment, Andrew Jackson, they've made their decision, let them enforce it. I actually suspect they'll find an unpopular or left wing, maybe DEI, Obama appointed federal district judge who hands down a pretty
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
liberal opinion let's just say anti-trump opinion and that's the one they'll say with a temporary restraining order maybe and that's the one they'll say this is unacceptable it goes too far it threatens our security and safety we're not obeying it or we're asking the supreme court expedited review you've got to strike this down this week this america you know lives are at stake if usa id goes on doing what it's doing for another 30 or 60 or days or six months you're
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Or deportations would probably be a place for this. Yes, something where they've got the popular side, they think. The crisis might show up, therefore not quite as explicit denial of the crisis, but an appeal to the Chief Justice, to the Supreme Court, to in effect go along with them rather than with some federal district judge or maybe even a circuit panel. And I think it'll be interesting.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Roberts has always been very concerned about taking on, I think, the executive too directly, especially if it's a Republican executive position. Anyway, it's going to be an ongoing crisis. There may be, of course, a very dramatic moment of a showdown, but people have to be ready for many angles of this crisis, I would say.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
They're taking on the courts as they're taking on the rule of law more generally. If I could just say on the NIH thing, which I wrote about in Warning Shots, which is important substantively, it's also the case that in its appropriations bills, passed in a bipartisan way by Congress for the last 70 years.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Congress explicitly says you can't change the reimbursement rates for indirect costs for these NIH grants because Trump tried to do it in 2017. There was a big bipartisan rebellion against that, and they put this in the appropriations bills. Those are laws. I think there'll be a lawsuit filed later today, presumably by hospitals and medical schools and so forth against Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
But they are just routinely breaking the law. You know, I mean, attesting, in a sense, whether the courts will let them get away with it or whether there are just so many instances that all the groups that might wish to try to stop them won't.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
And certainly testing whether Congress, which the members of whom voted for these appropriations bills last year, I believe, they tend to be bipartisan, those kinds of bills. Are they going to do anything about this?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I mean, of course, the Justice Department is actually representing the administration in all these cases before course. I guess they've got people in there who are willing to make some of these arguments are colorable. So maybe it's, you know, it's okay to I'm not criticizing career people necessarily for making an argument against the temporary restraining order. Maybe there's plausibility.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
arguments on their side. But at some point, I do think people in justice are going to start refusing to make some of these arguments, sign some of these briefs. I think in the past, there's been a bit of a waiver for people who didn't feel they could conscience sign a brief, and they haven't. I've read somewhere that the Trump administration may just regard that as grounds for firing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
So I think the degree to which, precisely what you're saying, this legal strategy they're following is going to
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I don't know, make it easier, I guess you could say, to purge the Justice Department because who's going to want to work there, especially in any area in which any of this sort of impinges on and put your name and go on briefs that you think are not right or really wrong and almost knowingly wrong, you might say. So, yeah, the general crisis of the rule of law is very great.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
Absolutely. Just one other note on that. I mean, the acting. U.S. Attorney for D.C., which is an important job because so much, obviously, a lot of these cases. Evil Ed Martin. I think you've discussed him on this show. He's way beyond, I think, going in the direction you're describing than Bondi. I don't even think they'll nominate him to be confirmed because he wouldn't be, I suspect.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
But there he is acting, you know, U.S. Attorney and firing people. Yeah. and putting out memos and with the ability to order prosecution of people. That's the actual line prosecuting office, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: The Law Be Damned
I don't know. There's complicated Vacancies Act rules, maybe 120 days. I don't know. There are ways to jiggle the rules that he or people like him could be in there for a long time.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
This is a little congressional grant of power, the emergency powers that Trump is using. It can be overturned, as I understand it, by 51 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House. And I don't know that it's even vetoed, could be vetoed if they pass that resolution, withdrawing that grant of power. Is that true? I think so.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
67 in the senate democrats need to hammer home i think they're not doing quite enough of this in my opinion the fact that four republican members of congress could stop this or at least reverse it for now and let trump then veto it and let's have an override vote and put everyone on the record i mean I was on a conference call recently, some Democrats explaining why they really couldn't do much.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Maybe they should get a little out of the why we can't do anything as a minority mindset and a little more into the let's try to do everything and then make the Republicans explain why they're, the Trumpy Republicans explain why they're stopping it and the wishy-washy Republicans explaining why they're not actually just joining the Democrats to...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Ja, ich würde ein bisschen später darauf hinweisen, das wäre late 2008 gewesen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Ich meine, Vorges' Sache ist unglaublich, weil, wie er gesagt hat, er ist sowieso Anti-Tarif, er ist ein Freetrader, aber wenn du es tun würdest, sie sehen es so aus, als ob sie es in der stupestesten, am schädigendsten möglichen Weise gemacht hätten, including the math errors and the kind of insanity of how they calculate this country by country tariff.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
I mean, Mike Turner, who was the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, a Republican from Dayton, deposed by Trump's orders. I don't know if he's going to run again or not. He could be a speaker. I guess I don't say acting speaker, but I guess he'd have to be the real speaker for three months, six months. You could almost explicitly say this is for the rest of this fiscal year or something.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Get aid for Ukraine, which he cares a lot about. Get rid of the tariffs. Maybe one or two other things. Just fix the most egregious things Trump has done. Obviously tell everyone on most issues, you vote however you wish. And, you know, if the Democrats want to pass stuff, they can pass stuff, you know. Yeah, I wonder how it doesn't happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
It never happened, but it's rarely happened in American history. But people do change parties in American history. And occasionally at the state level, right? You've had these kind of compromise situations in state legislatures. So anyway, I agree. It's worth getting out there. The Democrats need to think a little more imaginatively about this moment, too.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
They can't simply sit around saying we're in the minority by four votes, so we just can't do anything. And I think those people who turned out on Saturday to demonstrate, they want to see a little more activity on the Democrats' part.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
So it's really, it is like, let's have a bad policy and then execute it horribly, you know.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
And that the congressional Republicans are part of the problem, not just Trump, because Trump himself isn't on the ballot in 26. I think it's kind of cost-free to try to do the stuff. If they stop you, then you say, well, they stopped us from trying to do the stuff. It's like the Democrats trying to cut off funding for Iraq. They didn't do it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
They knew they were going to succeed with Bush as president, but it got them, from their point of view, the right side of that issue.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Wo war er dieses Wochenende?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Und es hat auch einen Effekt auf der Außenwelt, weil Musk jetzt seine Freunde, seine Unterstützer legitimiert hat, um diesen Weg zu gehen. Musk hat das getan, das wird mehr Menschen auf der Außenwelt führen, die bereit sind, kritisierbar zu sein.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Trump und Musk und alle, die auf der Vereinigten Front sind, die Menschen, die Musk lieben, es ist unglaublich, dass jeder das tut, aber zumindest seine Kollegen, Silicon Valley Bros und all diese Charaktere, would be hesitant to be criticizing perhaps the policy. So you asked me earlier, can I praise Musk? I really can't praise Musk. I just can't do it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
But I'm glad he is saying what he thinks about these tariffs, I guess.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
civil liberties types rand paul nothing no it's i mean it's all horrifying and uh The Republicans on the Hill have been pretty bad, too. Certainly within the administration there's been just contempt. So the federal judge in this case, there are several cases, but Judge Boasberg in one of these cases has been very careful and cautious, I would even say, in what he can and can't order.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Is there justification? Can he review what the administration has done? He's really tiptoed up to the line of saying, I mean, he has said, you guys have to try to get this guy back. They're not saying, well, okay, or okay, but not trying that hard. That might be what a normal administration would do. But to go through the motions, they're just showing contempt for him.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
I mean, that would be little contempt in court, though that might be the case too. But just, you know, making contemptuous statements about, oh, good, you go get him back from El Salvador. You have jurisdiction over the... over the president of El Salvador.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Untertitelung. BR 2018 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung. BR 2018
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Das war so ein fundamentalistischer Freemarkt. Vor Friedman, ich denke, Friedman narrierte es, aber ich denke, es war in den 50er oder 60er Jahren. Es gab eine Organisation, die mich verletzt hat, die wirklich populäre Bildung in Freemarkten promotierte. Das wird er korrigieren. all the errors of the due deal and of democratic socialism and stuff. Hey, don't get our listeners mad about the pencil.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 Untertitelung. BR 2018
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Well, there was interesting about free trade, incidentally. Someone made this point in an article over the last few days. John Gans, I think. Free trade was an important part of the due deal. People forget that. I mean, what's the most famous tariff in recent times? Smoot-Hawley, 1930, Republican tariff. What did Roosevelt do? He reduced tariffs in 1934.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
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The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Labor wasn't crazy about some of the free trade stuff, so he didn't publicize it as much, but it was very much part of the intellectual, you know, sort of organization, so to speak, of the New Deal.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Absolut. Ich meine, er hat versucht, das im Jahr 2018 zu tun. Dann wurde er stoppt. Die Defense Department wollte es nicht tun. Die Armee wollte es nicht tun. Die D.C. Regierung wollte es nicht tun. Republikanische Mitglieder des Kongresses sagten, was machen wir? Wir haben keine Militärparaden hier in den USA. Nur weil du Präsident bist.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Ich meine, es gab keine, keine Erinnerung an eine Gewinnung oder etwas in einer Kriege. Und jetzt wird die Armee einige normale Feierabende seines 250. Geburtstags an Baisen und in Gemeinschaften und Zementarien und solche Dinge. And now Trump wants to turn it, we'll see what happens, into this giant military parade, four miles from Arlington up to the White House, I suppose.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
It happens to be his birthday. Andrew Ager and I both heard about this in the warning shots. Andrew had a very good lead item on Trump's hubris, the Trump administration's hubris in a whole bunch of areas. Maybe this will be the culmination of the hubris. Maybe this is the breaking point. Maybe people look at this and think, this is not America.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
And this is Trump just using troops, using people serving in the military as props for him. If it happens, it also happens to be the 85th anniversary of the Germans entering Paris. You know, those famous videos of Germans marching into Paris. Very depressing day. It happens to be the 85th anniversary of that. Maybe that's somehow apt.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
And tariffs historically, you know, could be gamed by the big corporations, the big businesses. So, whereas you can't do that if you're just a working guy and you have to go to the store and buy stuff and so forth. So, and invest in, you know, modest amounts in the stock market. Anyway, the Friedman thing, it is a kind of nice, simple explanation of free trade.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
I devoted my own little newsletter Friday morning entirely to quoting from and praising. JBLs Newsletter and elaborating on it a bit. I've been very struck by this since February, since the Vance speech in Munich, the Hexess speech. The degree to which Europeans saw, whoa, this is really not just the normal zig and zag of policy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
It's not even the normal Trumpy kind of pseudo, you know, a bit of a break from previous policy that we're going to have to manage more carefully. It really could be the end of 80 years. And I think the one-two punch of Putin and Ukraine
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Die Threats von NATO, Vance's Opinion über Europa, vollständig dargestellt in diesem Signal-Chat, und Trumps Willen, es zu unseren europäischen Alliieren zu stecken, und dann die Trades-Wahl, die so viel gegen Europa wie gegen jemand anderes ist. Ich meine, die Kombination all dessen, ich hatte ein Abendessen mit einem zentralen europäischen Geschäftsführer in einer kleinen Gruppe,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Last week here in D.C. He's pro-American, totally pro-American. There's businesses that do stuff in America and so forth. It's kind of a think tank that's kind of pro-Atlantic, pro-American. And he says it's fundamentally changed. Now, JBL says it couldn't be put back together again. I resist that because I want to resist it, I suppose. And so, I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
These things can be pretty bad and still... Das ist ein Problem. Er ist Präsident, Trump ist Präsident. Ich meine, wenn wir ein Parlamentarier-System hätten, ich denke, es könnte ein bisschen umgekehrt werden. Ich habe bemerkt, dass es in den Terroristen ein bisschen über Liz Truss gesprochen hat. Ich denke, sie war die letzte.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Richtig. Und sie war wie ein Terrorist, ein totaler Desaster. Sie hat den Exklamationpunkt auf die uttere Verletzung der britischen...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
conservative governments since brexit including brexit i guess and uh and then led the way to the labor victory finally over her successor but that's a parliamentary system and we have no mechanism to remove trump and whereas in the first term if one had removed him one would have gotten mike pence which you and i would have some problems with but would have been acceptable now we get vance which really is
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Worse, I suppose, I don't know, as bad. So this is where I think JBL could well be right and where the Europeans who are thinking this through in a pretty sober way are kind of, it's not, as I say, it's not like we could all suddenly three months from now, the policies are failing, new government. Old Republican Don Bacon is President of the United States or something.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Or, you know, some coalition government comes in. So, four years of Trump and Vance, and even if they lose that, no guarantee that this doesn't come back yet again. I think the odds are unfortunately decent that this is a real end of an 80-year period, not a big zig in a succession of zigs and zags. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
I mean, that's why these tariffs are so particularly stupid. They seem to be premised Voyager könnte das besser erklären, ich bin sicher, dass er das besser erklären würde, als ich. Und die Idee, dass unser bilateraler Handelsbalanz mit jedem Land 0 sein sollte, sollte even sein, richtig?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Nein, ich habe das auch gedacht. Und es ist nicht ein furchtbarer Gedanke, natürlich. Aber ich möchte nur zurückkommen zu dem einen Ding, den Sie so gut gestresst haben, wirklich ehrlich gesagt, in den letzten, nicht nur in den letzten, wir haben es gestresst für mehrere Jahre, ehrlich gesagt, in der ersten Sitzung, wir haben es gestresst. Aber jetzt wirklich, wirklich.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Wir haben eine starke Legislatur. Wir haben keinen französischen Präsidenten, der einfach ignorieren kann. Wir haben einen starken Präsidenten, also ist es ein bisschen schwieriger, wenn man nur die Legislatur hat.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Aber vier republikanische Senatoren, vier republikanische Mitglieder des Kongresses könnten wirklich den Schaden langsamen, könnten wirklich beobachten, dass sie die Predigt für die Rückkehr von einigen von ihnen haben, könnten anderen Nationen sagen, dass, hey, es wirklich eine Mehrheit in diesem Land gegen Trump ist. Es ist unfreundlich, dass er Präsident ist.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Wir werden das für den nächsten Jahr durcharbeiten.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
three and a half years it could make a big difference and the fact that they're i come back always to this i'm just so infuriated that the republicans on the hill who know better privately i run into journalists all the time i privately they're very upset very upset really you know they're just really in a state about this i've heard they've had a strong conversation with howard lutnick i mean these are elected members of congress you know and they're totally failing in their responsibility brian fitzpatrick do your job
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Ich meine, nicht, dass wir handeln, wir wissen, wir importieren mehr Sachen aus diesem Land, damit wir mehr aus diesem Land exportieren können, und es ist ein riesiges Ding, und es ist even, und es hilft jedem über die lange Zeit. Das ist eine vergleichbare Vorteile, und jeder hat ihre spezialisierten internationalen Ressourcen. Das ist so dumm. Ich meine, es ist so dumm.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Ich meine, es ist so dumm. Ich meine, es ist so schrecklich und die Märkte sehen es richtig. Ich habe mit einem anderen Ökonomist dieses Wochenende gesprochen, der in diesem Fall nicht steht. Ich habe gesagt, sind Sie überrascht von der Severität der Marktreaktion und was für das wirklich zählt?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Und er sagte, es ist teilweise so, dass die tatsächlichen Tarife die tatsächliche Wirtschaft, die Preise, die Importe usw. schaden werden. Aber es ist auch die unglaubliche Blödsinn und Unwissenheit, die Trump und sein Team gezeigt haben. Der Markt preist das jetzt ein, was, wie Sie und ich schon diskutiert haben, sie für die letzten drei bis fünf Monate seit der Wahl beurteilen wollten.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Es wird nicht wirklich passieren.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
You know, I watched the clip of Besant. Yeah, he's such a bad defender. I do feel like, I think I tweeted this, the Democrats should just stay off all TV for the next two weeks and let Besant and Kevin Hassett and Lutnick go on. Because every time they go on, they make it worse for Trump. But Besant's super clever thing was, we should be glad the markets worked well.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
You know, like the actual computers were able to process the trades as the markets dropped 2,000 points. Thank God for that. And secondly, he had this fake argument that, well, the markets dropped on election night in 2016, which is true. I think they went down several hundred points. They literally rebounded like in three days, if I'm not mistaken, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
And the markets priced incorrectly that Trump, I mean, whatever you think of Trump, obviously, but that he was going to be kind of a pro-business president. And mostly they priced in the fact that we were at a strong recovery finally after the Great Recession and it was going to continue. And Trump didn't mess it up, actually. weil diese Terroristen im ersten Termin sehr unabhängig waren.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Das ist ein guter Fallstudium, auch in dem, worüber wir schon lange diskutiert haben. Der zweite Termin ist nicht der erste Termin. Der erste Termin war ein bisschen Blödsinn, ein bisschen Trumpfigkeit, ein bisschen Willenswürdigkeit, aber verhängt von den Angriffen. Nicht hier, verhängt von all diesen Leuten.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Und natürlich kann ich sagen, dass ein Freund von mir, ein Freund von mir auf der Wall Street, mich bemerkt hat, dass Scott Besant in Ordnung sein wird. Er wird der Junge im Raum sein. Und es ist wirklich wichtig, dass er den Treasurer-Sechretär-Job hat. Und How's that working out?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
It's going to be automated, of course, once it comes back here. But what is that? I thought all these manufacturing businesses were supposed to produce jobs. So he's giving away the truth, which is automation is what's killed the jobs, not free trade. But anyway, yeah, he's terrible. I mean, he really is awful. Some other defender of Trump, that Bill Ackman guy in New York, attacked.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
This was good when they all started fighting each other. Well, the reason Lutnick is defending the tariffs is that his firm is a bond firm, Cantor, I think, in New York. And he's long bonds, and if you're long bonds, you don't mind a little economic slowdown, because bonds do fine, as opposed to stocks, as I understand it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
And therefore he's like, you know, it's his book, he's defending his self-interest. So to get these billionaires sniping at each other and claiming they're just doing this for the sake of their own
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
their own book that's a good that's a good development i think again we have to suffer for it it will be entertaining to watch all this you know and the penguins the penguins have been excellent memes i've got to say do you not agree with that this really uh the penguin memes have been good the ackman thing
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
That's a good line. I want to wear Nikes. I don't want to make them. I mean, it's a deep kind of understanding of free markets and comparative advantage. You should go to AEI, Chappelle. That was good.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
It would be nice if Trump could discredit himself without ruining the country. I mean, this is the... Ja.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
Is that too hopeful? A little bit, yeah. I mean, I think the darkest period has passed or is passing. The question is, and you've remarked on this also over the weekend and late last week, these nice Republican congressmen and senators who were so upset about this, maybe they could actually do something about it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity
So we're at the being concerned stage, same with the donors, same with the Wall Street guys, same with everyone, you know. So those people could have a lot of effect, the donors obviously within the administration to some degree, but also on members of Congress. So they should be pushing members of Congress to stop this.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
No, it's a big moment. It's the continuation of what we saw already two weeks ago, obviously, with the Trump-Putin phone call, the Hegseth and J.D. Vance speeches, the Rubio visit to Riyadh. This is kind of the culmination of it, I would say, the betrayal of Ukraine. There was no fresh military aid coming from Trump anyway.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
The idea that he's cutting it off because Zelensky was disrespectful is, in a way, I think, ridiculous. Maybe he'll stop some of the aid that's already in the pipeline, I suppose. The degree to which the Europeans saw right away what was happening is striking. A friend sent me some Headlines from German newspapers on Saturday. And they saw this was not just about Ukraine.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
It was about fundamental pivot of American foreign policy. Forget about NATO. Forget about Europe. Forget about defending democracy. He's with Putin. He'll be cutting deals with Putin to... in accord with what he sees to be their interests.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
German foreign minister had a terrific speech where she said how terrifying and terrible it was that America joined the side of the perpetrators, not the victims of aggression and of crimes. And so Europe understood right away, Russia understood. There's a good article in the Washington Post this morning quoting
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
the various putin spokespeople and allies about how happy they are it was a gift the whole thing is why everything's wonderful these are basically we don't even have to i've got this here this is a peskov yeah peskov says the new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations this largely aligns with our vision right the russians and that's that that's the truth and they're happy you know it's interesting they want to rub it in right they don't um
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Want to give Trump a lot of dignity. They don't mind humiliating him a little bit. Maybe they think that makes him even more susceptible to being pushed around further. And I'm not so sure they're going to make a deal. So they may want to also sort of get ready to really just try to conquer all of Ukraine and dare Trump to do anything, which they seem pretty convinced he won't.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
So the Europeans are in a state correctly. We'll see if they can help Ukraine defend itself. I'm worried about six months or 18 to 24 months from now that they decide if we're over here, the U.S. has walked away, we better cut our own deals with Russia, start the energy going again. And you can imagine a very bad cascade of appeasement.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
But I've got to say to their credit, that has not been happening yet. And their reaction has been the opposite. They do not want to betray Ukraine. And Zelensky is not going to give up and Ukraine is not going to give up. But sustaining the world order without the U.S. on side, asking the Europeans to do it and our Asian friends to do it, that's a tall task.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I would have been very skeptical it could happen a year ago. Now I think maybe they can do it for a while at least until we come back on side. The other point I'll make is that Congress could act to mitigate some of the damage, but that would require a few Republicans having some courage, and we haven't seen a lot of that happening. Did we this weekend? We saw a couple, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I mean, totally, that's really a key point. I mean, who would trust Trump? Let's say there's a fake peace agreement and even Russia gets some additional territory or something and they're doing horrible things in the territory they have and then they have a fake excuse for an incursion. What is Trump going to do?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
But this is where the Europeans saw this too and saw that, just to take that to the next step, what is NATO anymore? NATO depends on Article 5 and on the assumption that we're all in if someone's attacked. Will Trump act if the Russians do a little green men thing in Estonia?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Will Trump act if the Russians try to subvert governments of NATO members, as they have been trying in Romania and elsewhere? I mean, the degree to which the whole post-war structure is at risk, not just Ukraine. I mean, that I think is what the Europeans saw right away. And that's where they're really talking pretty seriously. Again, I can't quite believe they can sustain a
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
security arrangement without the US being the anchor. That's been the case. We have been for 80 years. Maybe they will. The incoming Chancellor Meritz is talking that way. They are increasing defense spending. It looks like they're going to. We'll see. I'm very worried that that's hard to sustain. They'll have their own domestic politics.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Parties in Europe are going to say, what are we doing here? America's gone in the other direction. We need to go that way, too. So I'm very worried about that. And as we were saying, how much is Congress going to do? In theory, Europe and Congress could sort of make up for a U.S. president, maybe. But we haven't had to run this experiment for 80 years, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
We haven't had a situation where an American president fundamentally wants to just destroy the post-World War II order.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
And I think it was a Friday or Saturday that The Washington Post reported that. That under Pete Hegsath, presumably with Trump's sign-off, the Defense Department has stopped a program that was trying to both deal with Russian cyber offenses and other kinds of sort of – well, those kinds of offenses, let's say non-kinetic offenses here in the U.S.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
And also we had some counter offenses presumably going on to disrupt their stuff, and they seem to have called that off. So basically – We're not considering Russia an enemy anymore. I mean, how long can the sanctions last once you have this attitude? I mean, why should Trump even keep them on at this point? He has no, what's the reason? What's he asking for? What's he punishing Putin for?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
One thing that really alarmed me about the article in the Post, it's a little murky, and I'd be curious to see follow-up reporting. It feels like we're also letting down all our defenses against Russian intervention in the 2026 or 2028 elections. I mean, why do we have, let's go back, why do we have this concern with Russian cyber and social media type activities?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I think we have good reasons to have those concerns. Well, as Trump said in 2016, he wanted Russia to intervene, right? What did he say? Please release the emails. I guess that was about the stolen emails with WikiLeaks. But Trump, he likes Putin because he likes Putin. He likes authoritarians. He also likes Putin because he himself wants to be an authoritarian here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
And he thinks Putin might well be a useful ally to have in that effort.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the tariffs thing is the most bewildering. I mean, in the sense that it's that just seems genuinely to be his obsession. And I don't even think it's really been a big MAGA obsession, particularly.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
And if you combine it with slightly rising inflation, which looks to be the case, and slightly rising unemployment, which could be the case, that could really hurt the economy. It's such a question. What do you think, Demi, if the economy is weaker six months from now?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Does that make Trump revert to more normie republicanism, or does it increase his temptation and tendency to go in a sort of real authoritarian direction?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
And maybe what we saw after, you know, November 3rd to January 6th. Now, I think we just, again, have to come back to how the first Trump term featured James Madison, Secretary of Defense, and Tillerson, whatever one thought of him, but then Pompeo, Secretary of State, and Bolton in there, and McMaster, then Bolton.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I mean, such a different cast of characters, a Republican Party that still had some memory that they were supposed to act as members of Congress and not simply as Trump. I mean, they were pretty bad, don't get me wrong, but it's so different. That's, I guess, what strikes one the most.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Marco Rubio pathetically trying to climb into Trump's, stay in, I guess, Trump's, not even good graces, but enough graces that he doesn't get fired tomorrow. by the most pathetic statement they put out afterwards, you know, kind of, and then Lindsey Graham too.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
And what was striking about those two statements is they really were Stalinist or Stalinoid, I guess is the word, in the sense that it wasn't just, look, it's, you know, Trump did the right thing and Zelensky has to come. It wasn't Mark Teason. Zelensky has to come around. We still have a chance to make this all work, but Zelensky has to be a nicer guy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
That would be bad, but that would be a kind of coherent statement by someone who is pro-Trump. But does actually want to help Ukraine. They did not go that way, right? They really were all in to show Trump that Trump had said Zelensky was a threat to peace or couldn't be a partner for peace. And we're saying the exact same thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
And then Lindsay says something about we just may have to, in effect, get rid of Zelensky. So we are, I mean, the degree to which they felt they had to abase themselves is, I think, very sadly, Very revealing. But yeah, in terms of the authoritarianism, I don't know. Yeah, he really triples down on the deportations, more of them to Guantanamo, more horrible treatment of them, more raids.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I mean, you can imagine very ugly scenarios in that area in immigration, as well as in others. And what if it does come out in some of these Doge efforts? I don't know, God forbid, what if a real public health, real current, quick public health effects.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I think the indirect effects are terrible for what our biomedical research capability will be five years from now and what kinds of people will go into those things and keeping decent people in government. There are a million problems. But what if Ebola gets loose in Africa or something? I mean, the degree to which Trump is not the type to say, gee, I guess we made a mistake.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
We need to restore this stuff. Maybe he would. He's done that a couple of cases, I guess, in the last two, three weeks. I don't know. What do you think?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I've been thinking a little about how sort of what the domestic policy and foreign policy sides have in common, and it does seem to be interesting. A similar kind of just utter recklessness and cavalier attitude towards existing structures. Again, one can imagine some of these areas of AID and NIH and so forth saying, look, we really want to save money.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
We want to weed out a third, a half, two thirds of some of what's being spent in some of these programs. We're going to do it in a systematic way. And a year from now, you'll see progress. Two years from now, usually presidents have a four-year horizon, right? Four years from now, we'll be down 60%. You guys will be really pleased. And you won't notice anything because you know what?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
A lot of this money was wasted and was spent on DEI and on, you know, woke stuff and all this. That's the normal thing you do, leaving aside whether they would have been right that the money is wasted. The recklessness, the pleasure they take in the slashing and leaving pregnant women without care in Africa or in firing civil servants who've worked hard for X number of years with no notice.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I mean, which again is utterly unnecessary. The amount of money at stake is minute compared to giving them, you know, not renewing their contracts for people a year from now or treating people in a decent way. They like the cruelty of Doge. They like...
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
The cruelty, in a way, of bullying Zelensky, but the recklessness in both cases, assuming that things won't just really go bad in the world or at home, is what the foreign and domestic policies have. Elon's doge and Trump's treatment of Zelensky are sort of parallel in some ways. And I don't know. We're a big, strong country.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
We could survive a lot of bad things in maybe six months from now, and it won't feel that different in people's lives. But I'm not so sure about that, really. I'm very struck just the number of people I've talked to I don't know if you found this, not political people. I'm here in D.C., so I hear more of them. The brain drain and the character drain we're going to have for the U.S.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
government, two people in the military, friends of friends, I don't know them, wanted to come see me privately, thought maybe I could give them some advice. I don't know if I really have much good advice. They're mid-career, rising stars in the military, young people, a little younger even than you. And they were going to stay in, they assumed, and make that their profession.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
They hoped, I think, to become general officers, very high up. And now they don't. Do they want to be there with this stuff going on? Do they want to have to weigh whether they have to obey orders that they think might be unlawful? But they won't have a JAG to help tell them that because they fired the JAGs and they're putting in compliant people presumably.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
The number of people, and this is the military, then there's public health, then there's a million other things, right? I mean, the Justice Department, the degree to which whatever one thinks of the civil service, the military, the civilians at DOD, the public health establishment, they all are not perfect, God knows. But the degree to which we're putting it all at risk. And again, for what?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
For what? I mean, because they have some- that's what I don't understand really, honestly though.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
No, they're not earnest libertarians who have convinced themselves excessively that the private sector will do this better. And we've got some studies here from, you know, Cato and some other AI. That's not the spirit in which it's being, that might be dangerous in its own way, but that's not the spirit in which, that was Reagan to some degree.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
That's not the spirit in which this is being done, you know?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I mean, it was a setup, obviously, by Trump and J.D. I don't know if it was semi-bad cop and really bad cop or what, but J.D. knew what he was doing. He had his little talking points prepared. They wanted to do what Trump later says in the tweet, portray Zelensky as an enemy of peace, to...
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
damage, support for Zelensky here at home, especially among those Republicans, half of them on the Hill, right, who a year ago voted for aid to Ukraine. To carry out Trump's pro-Putin policy, he needs to move the entire Republican Party in his direction, or at least it would be helpful for him to do so, not just the half of it that's with him already. That's what the purpose of this meeting was.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
No, you've described it very well. Someone said this would be illegal in every country in the world. This is not like, oh, the U.S. has very strict rules. We have the you know, we have SEC. This is just slightly more relaxed attitude.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
This is just stealing money from the taxpayer or from Marx or from, I suppose, the Marx who didn't you know, who didn't know when they were supposed to buy and when they were supposed to sell on these exchanges. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Zelensky came here to sign a deal. He made big concessions because he wanted to honor Trump's somewhat ridiculous, I believe, request and somewhat extortionate request for the deal on minerals. He came here for that reason. Then they changed the deal and sandbagged Zelensky. J.D. was kind of the heavier of the two sandbaggers, but Trump went pretty far too.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Do you think the kleptocratic and plutocratic side of
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Sam and I did a pod yesterday. You'll be glad to know, which covers some of this, but we can get into much more depth here. Sam, you know, you kind of skate across the surface. With Tim Miller, you're talking about the deep dives, you know?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Well, I think the way J.D. went at him left Zelensky no choice. If you think about the alleged deal they wanted a week ago, it included Zelensky holding elections in Ukraine. That's become a huge talking point on the pro-Trump right, which he said he can't do and won't do and the Constitution doesn't permit him to do in Ukraine. This deal is going nowhere anyway.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
So they weren't going to get a deal with Zelensky. They're not going to get a deal with Putin, I suspect, unless it's a total and utter just capitulation to let him keep fighting and devastating Ukraine. And so I think this was for Trump's domestic politics here more than anything else.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Why aren't you thanking us after he's thanked us 100 million times? He literally thanked Trump and repeatedly went out of his way, having been treated pretty badly by Trump, I've got to say, has tried to be respectful and thank him. But anyway, yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
Right. And the feelings of a bully. So when Zelensky refuses to grovel, that sets Trump off. And there he was lecturing Zelensky. I mean, almost really unimaginable, I would say, that this was happening in the Oval Office. And I was struck, I'm sure you were, by it. I didn't see it. I was at a conference. I saw it shortly after.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
But the number of texts and emails I had from people, including people who aren't that political, people I haven't been in touch with that much, people who were slightly more Trump adjacent than I. I guess that's a very low bar, but who are somewhat Trump adjacent, you know, and acquiescent.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
People were just sickened, as one person said to me, by the spectacle of an American president and vice president lecturing Zelensky, who we have all supported and correctly supported for two and a half, well, three years, exactly three years, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I guess the laptop. He's conflating the Biden laptop, I suppose, with the alleged Russia hoax. But I think it's very revealing. I think he does lose it there. I don't think that's part of the intention, I suspect. Very revealing that he thinks Putin went through it with him. He and Putin are buddies. They are allies. They were unfairly besmirched. They are together in this fight.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I mean, he just explicitly says that. There's no more of the pretense of, I'm a hard-headed guy negotiating with Putin, and there are some problems with what Russia's been doing. at some point in the world, or maybe at some point in the 2016 election, after all. Nope. I mean, one forgets in 2016, he asked Russia to intervene.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I mean, this has been, but this is the full flowering, I'd say, of not just the abandonment of Zelensky, but the embrace of Putin.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
You don't think Putin was really wounded, you know, psychologically had a tough time when Adam Schiff criticized him. Yeah, it is funny. Trump is a thin-skinned bully, and he sort of wants to believe Putin is, too. He must know at some level that Putin is infinitely tougher than he is and couldn't care less what Adam Schiff says and cares about results, not about feelings.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
But, you know, that is interesting, the psychology of that, right? Trump wants to put himself on the same level as Putin. He knows that he's not.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
I think that's such an important point that, I mean, Trump and J.D. Vance would not have stayed in Kiev on February 25th, 2022. They would have been on the first plane out and they and their families and whatever, you know, buddies they have in various schemes and grifts and so forth. They would have been leaving from wherever there was danger.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
At some level, there's a deep resentment of Zelensky for actually being courageous and manly and in his slightly understated way, you might say. I think the not wearing the suit is a comical MAGA complaint too, which normally they like informality, authenticity, right? But in this case, Trump's the guy who wears the suit and Vance in this case.
The Bulwark Podcast
Bill Kristol: Kleptocrats and Plutocrats
So they have to turn it against Zelensky, like Churchill when he came to the White House in 1941, 42, 43, wore his kind of battle, you might say, battle out, battle fatigues, in effect.